Aquariums are beautiful to look at... very peaceful and relaxing. The only problem is that when something goes wrong, it is extremely stressful and taxing. I have a large piece of artificial driftwood in my aquarium, and it looks pretty nice if I might say so myself. The only problem is that it has several holes on it to allow water to flow into it. (I presume so as to now overflow a tank when being put inside it... otherwise it would displace quite a bit of water) I decided to plug up these holes with some filter floss so that my fish wouldn't go inside and get stuck/risk getting injured, but I recently discovered that I missed one fairly small hole... and all three of my clown loaches made it inside. I noticed that they were nowhere to be found after having spent 5 minutes tearing things apart trying to find them. My only conclusion was that it must have been the new branch in the tank. I started pulling it out of the water and heard them flopping around inside... and instantly panicked. All 3 of my lovely little clown loaches were trapped inside this damnable branch, and there didn't seem to be any way to get them out. I took out the filter floss and started trying to coax them out of the branch, slowly submersing it and then pulling it back out of the water, with the hopes of gently flowing them towards the easiest access point on it. It took me a good 40 minutes to get all 3 out of it safely. I proceeded to spend 10 minutes packing and re-packing all of the holes on this thing, until I could not force anything inside of it anymore... hoping that the holes are so adequately packed that the fish will not try to get inside. I had planned to be asleep well over an hour ago, as I have been sick for a week and have to be up in 6 hours for work... but instead I've been stressing out over my fish. I love my fish... and I've got a beautiful aquarium... but sometimes these things can be a major headache.
They're even more active than they used to be now, so I'm glad.