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The many fish deaths of childhood wound up multiplied many thousands of times when I thought it'd be a good idea to work in fish stores for about half a decade. Consider the feeder fish. The fish that are intended to die, and soon! Sometimes, they just die sooner than anyone wants. En masse. And the next thing I know, I'm using a letter opener to scrape an inch thick layer of congealed rotting fish corpse gel off of the prefilter sponge block. And then blindly stabbing the corpse chunks down the utility sink drain because I was running the water and didn't think to break the dead fish jelly into smaller pieces first. A similar incident occurred involving a bad batch of neon tetras, and those little fuckers are expensive in that quantity. I will not discuss the incident with the red hook silver dollar with a strange tumor that was to be euthanized and preserved for a Navy fish pathologist to examine, because that was an intentional kill that went horribly wrong. Now, store deaths are somewhat tangential to the topic: they're not my pets, and I didn't think of them that way, especially with the sheer quantity of death and disease ("Who ordered the red jewels? They have assworms. I don't need to look. They ALWAYS have assworms, this supplier is contaminated and they have no idea how to treat these things. I'll bet you 20. I will walk up to the tank and spot the loving assworms for you. See? Right there. And there. And that one. Half of them already have exposed assworms."). But they do put a hell of a filter on all the other fish deaths, to the point where only two stand out as really notable. I found an albino betta at a Petsmart. Red eyes, no skin pigmentation. Apparently they have poor eyesight, so as fry they grow slower and get cannibalized, and therefore adult albinos are not A Thing That Happens. And yet, there was one on the shelf right in front of me. Of course I had to have it. The next day I woke up in a 40 degree fahrenheit house because our house heater broke overnight and a little fishtank heater is certainly not up to handling those kinds of conditions. Near the end of my time at fish stores, a guy I knew got some juvenile bowfins, essentially the American native version of a snakehead. I got one, admittedly on impulse. I had a temporarily suitable tank half ready - the water was low, but it tested fine, still had some plants and an old amano shrimp I never bothered with removing. I wanted to get the tank topped off, but we're on well water. Weird well water. Very acidic, treated by a tempermental caustic potash machine, so we had some wildly fluctuating pH, in addition to some other weird properties. I didn't trust it. But our RO filter was way too slow, and I figured that a bowfin is the most absurdly resilient fish I will ever keep, so this time, it'll be fine. Topped off the tank. Checked the chemistry, looks fine, pH is surprisingly okay. Checked the temperature, looks good. Quick acclimation and transfer of the bowfin. Everything looks fine. I sit there and watch it for a while, then step away. I come back an hour later and the bowfin is lying at the bottom of the tank, extremely dead, covered in a thick layer of a combination of what was apparently ALL of its slime and blood extruded out through its skin. The amano shrimp is sitting on some driftwood like nothing's wrong. I didn't know what the gently caress. Nobody knew what the gently caress. Kinda gave up on keeping fish after that.
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Jun 15, 2015 10:49
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 01:16 |
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aerialsilks posted:As far as the rest of my family goes, none of them believe in euthanizing an animal in pain, which pisses me off to no end.  That's kinda hosed up. Any of those animals make horrible noises?
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Jun 17, 2015 03:12
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