We forgot the fish!

Posted by Sarah on December 31, 2008

If Jeff and I ever get better (we both have colds) we are going to tile the upstairs – since we have a 20 gallon long (20L) aquarium and a 20 tall (20T) that share a stand, and a 55 gallon aquarium that need to be moved this is going to be one interesting project.

In order to make things a little bit easier we decided to move all of the fish from the 55 into the 75 downstairs, which only held a pair of Blue Gularis killifish.

The killies are now happy in their new 29 in the fish room, and the other fish are all happy in the 75.

We were planning to move the German Blue Ram Fry and the Discus fry into the 75 and use that as a grow out tank, but I think we will put them in the 55 instead.

I don’t want to move all of those fish again, and it will be nice to be able to keep an eye on them a little bit more, since we spend most of our time upstairs.

While Jeff was in the process of moving the plants and caves out of the 55 so we could catch the fish more easily he noticed something streak across the tank.

Yup – we’d forgotten that the Pangio anguillaris were still in there.

Oops.

They only occasionally pop out while we’re watching, and we’d only seen two of them at a time when we had see them, so we had no idea how many were left.

We caught two relatively easily after we’d drained all but 6 inches out of the tank and caught all of the other fish, and then Jeff figured out that if he ran his hands along the sides of the tank he could find the loaches.

After he’d exhausted that method he started scooping up some of the substrate into the net, and when he caught a Pangio angullaris in with the substrate, it swam to the top of the net, where it could be easily caught with another net.

We have a lot of nets.

With a lot of work Jeff caught 4 of them, and then he started wondering if we’d only gotten 4 instead of 6.

We fired up the old computer, looked up the Aquabid auction, and sure enough – we’d gotten 6 of them.

Jeff managed to catch one more loach that night, then he waited until the next morning to see if we could find the other one.

Sure enough it was swimming around in the water when we got up, and Jeff caught it easily.

I still can’t believe that we forgot all about them – and it’s a good thing we noticed them swimming in the tank before we drained it completely.

Have you ever forgotten your fish, or found some sign of life in a neglected tank?

Leave a comment and let me know.