Worst fish experiences?

[ROLLIN]

What are some of your worst fish experiences? One of mine (well not something I did, something my father did), was the time my father decided to clean out the fish tank and filled it up with the bucket my mother used when she scrubbed the floor. It was a 10 gallon tank with 2 or 3 goldfish (many moons ago), we could smell pinesol for about 2 days before we knew what was going on (my father didnt know it was the bucket used when scrubbing the floor). Luckily none of the fish died.

[125gJoe]

I'd have to say - dead fish on the carpet.

Or, the large Goldfish that choked on a smaller Oscar! (for real..):eek:

[ROLLIN]

Dead fish on the carpet is definitely a bad one. I found my pleco a while ago dead on the carpet. :(

[ROLLIN]

What happened to the goldfish, did he live?

[Cearbhaill]

I recently did my first injection of antibiotics into a fish- pretty stressful for the both of us.

One of my Goldfish has "hole in wen" disease- a bacterial infection of the large fleshy growth on their heads.
The injection of Baytril (into the belly) went well- but with a bit more bleeding than I anticipated. For a moment or two I was convinced I had killed him, but he's doing fine.

[nvision]

i, too, have had sightings of DFoC... very depressing. and it's all my fault. i guess it comes with open-top aquariums. i tend to keep my water levels a bit lower now, and it's helping.

other stories which i've read that also popped into mind are the filling up the tank ones. ppl not remembering to attend to the faucet and ended up having water overflowing onto the floors. although i must admit it's very amusing to read, the experience must've been very traumatic.

[125gJoe]

Originally posted by ROLLIN
What happened to the goldfish, did he live? Unfortunately, no...

[dethjam316]

my friend had a betta he stupidly put in with a pictus cat and a red-tailed black shark. the poor betta had its fins completely chewed off. it was sad. the end.

[sumoschro]

lol id have to say when i was a beginning aquarist i had a freshwater crab of some sort and an african dwarf frog and both of them escaped, and, well, we never found them.....

[PumaWard]

selling a pair of oscars that were almost about to breed to the lfs for 7 bucks a piece (they were both 10-11 inches). I regret my ignorance :rolleyes: , lol.

[Cal]

the bottom of my 4 foot tank spilt, spilling 220l. of water onto the floor :mad: i was away as well. came back to a damp room...

lucky it didn't have any fish in it, i'd been growing my plants before introducing anything

[watcher]

Buying a psycho crayfish for one of my tanks. That bug ate everything-plants, fish, algae. I didn't mind eating the algae on bit, but after he killed his second fish, the crayfish went. Big mistake.

Another bad one was coming home to find my male red claw crab dead in the dining room-20 feet from the tank. Oops.

[case_rums]

Originally posted by sumoschro
lol id have to say when i was a beginning aquarist i had a freshwater crab of some sort and an african dwarf frog and both of them escaped, and, well, we never found them.....

I had the same thing with my fw crab. It escaped, never to be found again... Until my wife was cleaning under our bed... Man, my ears are still ringing :D

[MyLittleFishies]

Last year I was working at a school where they kept all kinds of fish (its an oceanography school) and one day in the middle of winter i show up as usual to clean the tanks and feed all the fish for the teacher and all the tropical fish are belly up... the stupit teacher left the windows open that nite and the temp of the tanks all droped to about 30f..... and this man was susposed to have like 5 degrees in oceanography.

[hineigger]

My worst experiance was...

As a n00b I bought a 55gallon and wanted something cool right away. I was given a free 10" red devil.

Little did I know he was WAY to big for a 55g, and he was constantly pissed. Constantly attacking the glass, and so big he was splashing water out.

I got rid of him quick.

[mogurnda]

Years ago, I was a fiend for Africans. Had a 110 set up with a collection of haps that I had grown from babies. Breeding groups of moorii, compressiceps (I know they're not haps anymore, but there were then), a few other odds and ends and a trio of gorgeous peacocks. Plus a few big balas as dithers. Note the sizes of those fish and the size of the tank, it was heavily stocked, but heavily filtered.

Went on my usual summer backpacking trip to the Sierras to regain my sanity, leaving my mom to take care of the tank. Came back after a week to find out that the filter had failed, and despite the best efforts of a coworker from the LFS I worked at, the tank crashed. All dead. Heartbreak. I couldn't even be mad, because that's the risk you take when you ask someone to watch your fish. On the positive side, it became my first SW tank.

The most unpleasant event happened when I lived inTucson. Went away to teach for a few weeks in the summer, and had my idiotic neighbor look in on my tank. It was a 29 with a breeding pair of angels, plus a small school of mature cherry barbs. At some point, the filter failed, and the cooler in the house went off. All dead. But the worst thing was that the little creep didn't even look in on the tank to remove the bodies. Imagine walking into the house, smelling the rotting soup of week old dead fish cooked in the Arizona summer. I almost hurled.

Now, every tank has backup circulation, and is stocked so that it can last a few days without power. The outages this summer tested the systems, and they came through fine. I'm still a little concerned about next week, when we both will be out of the country, but I have a reefer across the street I can trust to check things.

[WarriorZ]

Had a 55G and a 10G (now have 150G). I cleaned out the 10G using clorox on some of the items that had algae. Works great! But I put everything back in the tank too soon!!! Lot every Tetra fish in there.

They started swimming funny and I realized what I did. Started a water change and netting them out, but it was too late :(

And the occasional jumper.

[rainbowprizimz]

Unfortunatly the gravel I choose to use the first time, in my first tank (10g), HAD to be "painted" blue colored. The epoxy coating was diminished by the bacteria I used during cycling, and a couple of weeks after adding the fish my water became cloudy, murky almost. I noticed a lot of blue specks floating about in my water, which indicated to me that the gravel was the culprit. So I purchased natural gravel, with epoxy coating. I withdrew my fish from the tank, 7 adults and 8 fry(all gups). I emptied the tank 100% and scooped out the blue gravel. Added the new gravel, and a new filter cartridge, refilled the tank using AquaSafe. I re-acclimated all of the fish for about 20 minutes each. I must have watched those fish for a week constantly, hoping they'd survive such a drastic change. Fortunatly all of the fish survived, even the newborn fry, probably due the the bio-wheel.

[Divisive]

When I was first given a 10 gal fish tank, stocked, by a friend moving across the country, I was overwhelmed. I was really cautious at first. A couple of fish did not survive long after the transport to my house, and one fish was actually failing when I got it. With the recent deaths, I was reluctant to do anything to the tank.

My niece bought me a few interesting fish for Christmas to add to my tank, because she thought it was boring. One fish she bought me was a dwarf gourami. Then my mother had her heart set on buying me a shark. At the pet store, we were advised that a red-tailed shark and a dwarf gourami could easily live happily ever after in my tank. I took the shark home and put in the tank.

The next morning, my shark was missing, and the dwarf gourami looked beat up. My dwarf gourami died, and I found the shark when we moved seven months later.

[LMOUTHBASS]

the shark dead when you found it?

[~*LuvMyKribs*~]

I would assume so.... if it was outside the tank for seven months! :eek:


My worst fish experience.... hmmm.... was not knowing what I was doing when i bought my first betta.... and every time i cleaned the bowl i CLEANED THE BOWL. Scrubbed the gravel clean. Changed all the water. Then i wondered why he wasn't doing too well so i cleaned the bowl more. Well, he died, and I learned my lesson the hard way. (I was young, though :rolleyes: )

[often dignified]

Well, other than a couple dead fishies when I started out... just last week I emptied about 5 gallons of water onto the carpet during my water change. The end of the siphon didn't stay in my bucket... and I didn't realize it until I was all done :D

Luckily the wife hasn't found out ;)

[fishdude]

first starting out my new tank ::shudder:: i stocked it ful;l with goldfish before cycle and the temp was 78 LOL i was such a noob

also when i was setting up my 30 gal i was putting sand into a special spot i had made for my banjo catfish(they need sand to burrow) i missed the spot and dumped sand in my gravel and had to unplug the powerheads and remove the undergravel filter and then sort sand from rock :(

[often dignified]

oh I also mixed red and natural gravel... I had the 2 seperate layers in the tank. But when I vaccumed, it got partly mixed up. After that, I thought it would look good to be totally mixed, but it looked terrible. So I spent about 12 hours sorting red from white :o

[fishfood]

I've had several bad experiences with roomates and fishtanks. On more than one ocassion, a roomate or one of their guests decided that the fish wanted a sip of beer, liquor, etc. I always seemed to loose a fish or two after parties. :mad:

I also had roomates feed the fish without telling me. So, the fish were getting fed about 4 times per day. That didn't take long for decaying food, ammonia, dying fish, etc.

I'm so glad that I could afford to live alone the past couple of semesters! Now my fish live. :rolleyes:

[yhbae]

Worst experience for me:

Male platy stressed female #1, got her to catch some bacterial infection. She developed ich, and the whole tank was infected shortly after. Moved her to the hospital tank, and treated the whole community tank. Lost female #2 (even with absense of male) as she managed to catch the same disease as #1 female, just before ich treatment.

Result:
- The male is now in a 15g tank's breeder net!. (The tank is full of fries, he was bothering them too much!)
- Female #1 is dead.
- Female #2 is still getting the bacterial treatment for the past 2 months! Not optimistic that she will live.

Positive experience:
- Now I know how to treat ich for the whole tank!
- Many fries are growing nicely from #1 and #2 females.

And I thought platies are supposed to be easy... :D

[waterspirit]

I must say my worst experience involved two amphibians in my tank. One was a 8" caecilan (a snake/wormlike amphibian) and my 3" african clawed frog. Well, the frog tried to eat the caecilan and didn't fare too well. He could basically swallow the poor thing's head, but that was about it. The caecilan decided it was time to leave. So he did. We had no idea what happened to him until about 3 years later when we moved. We found the caecilan or should I say his dried up, yet amazingly preserved body under our couch.

[DEmigh]

Two disasters in the same tank.

In my first aquarium bigger than 10 gallons, I reached too far too fast. I dreamed of a South American river tank for discus and dwarf rams. The only problem is that Oklahoma City water is so hard that it's like gravel running through the pipes. I was only paying attention to pH at the time, however. I read in my Cichlid book that Discus (Disci? :) ) like a pH of 6.0 or lower. The pH in the tank was sitting at about 7.6. SeaChem Acid buffer was barely moving the pH and I didn't yet know how patient I needed to be, so I resorted to "pH Down" (some off-brand that I have since repressed from my memory) It was sulphuric acid in a dropper bottle. I began dosing the tank at 24 hour intervals and nothing was happening, so I stepped up the schedule a little bit. I think I had the biochemical equivalent of a Chernobyl incident (system seeming stable against big adjustments until... WHAM!). In the space of about 5 minutes, the water in the tank (55 gallons) seemed to change to milk :sick: Total fish mortality :sad except for one (apparently mutant) corydoras. Total tank tear down, gravel washing, filter scrubbing etc. The only silver lining was that this disaster solved my first problem with the same tank...

I had purchased several small meek cichlids (oxymoron) from my LFS. Two of them were the real thing, but one was an interloper, the juvenile form of something more like a piranha :rolleyes: I was keeping schools of cardinals and neons in the tank, which kept getting smaller as the "small meek cichlid" kept getting bigger. I must have fed him two dozen very colorful meals before I put two and two together. I stopped buying the little tetras and he stopped growing so fast (the poor undernourished thing!) I didn't want to just execute him (her?) though, so he stayed in the tank (with other fish too big to eat) while I decided what to do. I figured he could stand to stay in the tank to keep the biofilter active while I brought the pH down for discus, and that is where this long story started. :D

Thanks for your patience, I hope that the (horrified) amusement I may have provided made it worth wading through such a long post.

[Hans]

buying a lace plant, and then seeing that my silver dollars decided it would make a good salad for them....

at work, i made a kid cry, when i told him taht we feed goldfish to the turtles....

i love it when people watch my net fish out so close that i cant even move, and then when i get the fish in the net, he go nuts making a rainshower of fish goo on them

no disasters at home really.. mabey just a damned pregnut platy that wont stop poppin em out!

[yashinfan]

Alrighty, so mine was death-free but here we go:

So I got the fluval 203 for my 30 gallon tank. And I really didn't know how to use it since I bought it 2nd hand (ie: no instructions!) Now, after setting it all up, I couldn't get it to start. So I was playing with everything, and I was told to suck on one of the tubes to get it going. So I did, and I ended up swallowing a lot of water and spitting the rest into the tank. heehee.. okay, so then I was like "Yay! I can get it to work!" So I did but I had the input out of the tank at the time. So about 5 gallons of water were all over my floor, along with my garbage can full of water, and everything on me was SOAKED. I think I ended up with more water than the fish did *sigh*