A Royal Fishy Fuck Up

25 Nov 2024 | ~2 minute read

I recently added 5 new fish to my cichlid aquarium, but I managed to make a royal fuck up along the way.

So let me start with some background - I used to have a group of silver flying fox fish in my aquarium. They're beautiful fish that are really active and love munching on algae.

Over time the group dwindled away and I was left with a lone fish, but these fish prefer to be kept in small groups. so keeping the little fella on his own wasn't fair. Luckily my wife has a group in her tank, so we move him over to hers.

Fast forward 6 months and I'm starting to have a bit of a beard algae outbreak. Beard algae is like cat nip to silver flying fox fish, so this weekend I decided to buy another group for my tank.

I bought the fish, took them home and floated them to acclimatise to my tank. Then, just as I released them into the tank, I saw the little fellas swim out and they were tiny, despite me asking for "medium" size fish.

I immediately knew that these fish weren't going to last 5 minutes in this large cichlid tank, so I rushed out to where we store our fish supplies, got a net, and rushed back.

In those few minutes I'd already lost 3 of the fish. While opening the tank and looking for the remaining 2, I watched another get gobbled up by Dave, one of my krobia xinguensis.

Fuck.

I managed to get the last fish out of the tank, and I've put him in a much smaller aquarium to grow him out. I feel awful for the fish we lost, thanks to my own stupidity.

Now I need to go back to the fish shop to buy more, but this time I'll either put them in a grow-out tank or, you know, check the bag before emptying them into the tank.

We'e decided to call the last surviving fish Maximus (Max for short) after Russel Crow's character in Gladiator, as he's a proper little survivor to go through that and come out the other end!

RIP poor little fishies. 🐟🐟🐟🐟

• FishKeeping

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