I moved my catfish in his house

Karlsbad

Karlsbad

Sharkbait
Sep 23, 2003
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Chicagoland
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Hey I moved my fishies to their new tank today and I couldn't get my striped raphael off/out of his decoration thing which I planned to move with him, so I just moved him in it instead of bagging him. He was flying for about 10 feet and 5 seconds I think. He seems like he's ok, I mean he came out and swam around for like 15 seconds which is a lot of activity for him. I wish I had decided to move him on the rock before I spent five minutes freaking him out trying to coax and push him off.
 
raphaels are notorious for that. i have heard some crazy stories and even experienced a few. they like purposely "wedge" themselves in and refuse to let go, even if you touch them!

i had a running battle with my 2 for a couple of days to get them out of one of my decorations. i have a hollow fiberglass log that they jammed themselves into and nothing i did could coax or scare them out. i left the log near the top of the water with the light on for like 2 days, you would have thought they would have moved to a quieter spot..... finally i carefully cut the bottom off the log with a "roto-zip", but it still took quite awhile to get them to "let go".
 
if "only" it was that easy. :rolleyes:

if you stuck a spinning, cutting blade 2 inches away from my nose and started showering *me* with dust, i would want out. i even had the log inverted, out of the water, sitting over a 5 gallon pail with some water in it to catch them if they fell out for a bit and they *still* refused to let go.

on a positive note, neither is showing any ill-effects from my antics. :) (they are both very fat and happy and i have learned not to give them places to "wedge".)

i have heard other people talk about destroying decorations to get them out.

i was at a friends house one night when he decided to redecorate. he had 2 "spotted" and a similar log. he had me put it in the sink for him, sometime later i heard a noise and decided to investigate. i found one that had released and dropped into the bottom of the log. i quickly got it back to water and went back and flipped on all the lights to look closer. sure enuf the other was still in there and my friend sort of pried it out with a pen...... (i didn't even own fish at the time, so i didn't know any better.) his survived also tho. :)
 
My guy seems ok too thank goodness. In hindsight I should have known he's difficult to get out of that thing and scheduled the move for one of the times he comes out most mornings. I've gotten him out of there with some fuss before when I had a hair algae problem and I wanted to was the decoration, only he was about half his current size. While I was trying to get him out I even tried holding the decoration so his tail was out of the water and all he'd have had to do was swim foreward, but noooooooo.:shake:


It's a pretty cool walmart decoration with 2 flat rocks leaning against each other like an inverted ' V ' with a log and fake plants with flowers. 10 bucks. I don't patronize the fish dept at wally world anymore. It's actually pretty funny he used to get his whole body in the log, now he can just get his head in it.

There's got to be some trick like lubing him up or something, maybe holding a vibrator on the other side of the decoration. Maybe you could get a stuffed Oscar and hold it up to the catfish.

I put some Hikari bottom feeder pellets that he's never had before in the log hoping it will encourage him to trust me again, but it'll probably convince him there's no reason to come out anymore, especially with "that crazy guy that used to feed him that tried to pull him out of his house" out there. Yeah I think I'll only do that for one more day.
 
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