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I woke up this morning to a shout of horror from Shawn. I bolted upright, having been in that yeah-I-know-it-s-time-to-get-up-but-gimme-five-more-mintues semi-conscious state, and ran over to where she stood next to the five gallon tetra tank. She was staring at something on the floor and saying, "Oh, Lyda," in a rather pitying voice.
A tetra lie dead on the floor.
Apparently, sometime in the middle of the night, little tetra decided s/he could no longer live in that tank, and leaped to her/his doom.
WTF?
My theory? It was a lover's leap.
Okay, sure, fish sometimes get jumpy when the water quality in a tank starts to crash. As I admitted before, I have been known to go slightly more than a week in between water changes in this tank because it's such a pain in the butt to haul all the equipment upstairs. Also, they're fiddly in an annoying sort of way, because tetra demand soft water and I live in Saint Paul the land of tin-tasting water. And it is my smallest tank, so I probably should be changing the water a lot more than once a week, given that I'm keeping a full school of tetra (it was seven... then six... now five...) in only five gallons of water.
But, fish ALSO get jumpy when they're feeling frisky in a sexual sort of way, and there was one tetra who had been looking kind of egg-heavy several days ago.
So here's my theory. Egg lady gets sick and ends up plastered to the side of biofilter. Her lover is distraught and throws himself out of the tank in a Romeo & Juliet style death pact. Romantic, no?
It's a theory I like, if only that it explains the mystery of all the sudden deaths. I've been checking my water quality daily, and I did another big water change this morning. I'll probably keep up the water changes until I'm sure that everything is cool. As I told Shawn, no one ever died of clean water.
What do you think of my theory? Too far-fetched?
Yeah, probably, but what I *did* know for sure was that I needed more tetra. I went to Fish & Reptile on University and promptly bought five more tetra. Of course I took a movie! I'll upload it later today, so you can see my new babies tomorrow.
A tetra lie dead on the floor.
Apparently, sometime in the middle of the night, little tetra decided s/he could no longer live in that tank, and leaped to her/his doom.
WTF?
My theory? It was a lover's leap.
Okay, sure, fish sometimes get jumpy when the water quality in a tank starts to crash. As I admitted before, I have been known to go slightly more than a week in between water changes in this tank because it's such a pain in the butt to haul all the equipment upstairs. Also, they're fiddly in an annoying sort of way, because tetra demand soft water and I live in Saint Paul the land of tin-tasting water. And it is my smallest tank, so I probably should be changing the water a lot more than once a week, given that I'm keeping a full school of tetra (it was seven... then six... now five...) in only five gallons of water.
But, fish ALSO get jumpy when they're feeling frisky in a sexual sort of way, and there was one tetra who had been looking kind of egg-heavy several days ago.
So here's my theory. Egg lady gets sick and ends up plastered to the side of biofilter. Her lover is distraught and throws himself out of the tank in a Romeo & Juliet style death pact. Romantic, no?
It's a theory I like, if only that it explains the mystery of all the sudden deaths. I've been checking my water quality daily, and I did another big water change this morning. I'll probably keep up the water changes until I'm sure that everything is cool. As I told Shawn, no one ever died of clean water.
What do you think of my theory? Too far-fetched?
Yeah, probably, but what I *did* know for sure was that I needed more tetra. I went to Fish & Reptile on University and promptly bought five more tetra. Of course I took a movie! I'll upload it later today, so you can see my new babies tomorrow.