Critters/fish You Didn't Know You Had

[Dave Ehl]

It would be cool to find out some interesting stories of people that found critters or fish they either didn't know they had or had disappeared for a very long time. my only story is find my baby bichir swimming around after seeing him get eaten by my oscar. i was amazed.

 

[dnn3]

dude,why didn't you just steal my thread,i wouldn't have minded.that's kind of what it was about.

 

[Dave Ehl]

sorry, didn't want to be rude.

 

[dnn3]

that' okay.hopefully we'll get to read some good stories.

 

[Dave Ehl]

nobody has any cool stories?

 

[Corleone]

Kind of a sad one. I bought some kuhli loaches, and never saw them again. After a while, I figured they must have died and been eaten in the night or something, they were pretty small when I got them.

I tore down the tank a few months ago and moved its inhabitants to a 55 gallon tank. I moved the decor and plants, didn't notice anything out of the ordinary, netted out all the fish I knew were there, and siphoned the water down as far as I could. It was late, so I figured I'd leave the last half inch of water and gravel and handle it in the morning.

The next morning, all four kuhli loaches had emerged from lord knows where and died On the bright side, I did save about 30 trumpet snails from the tank which I never knew were there (and haven't seen since).

 

[Anguilla82]

We once emptied my parents pond completely to redo the liner, and found that we had a small green tench of around 6 inches long in there. We'd never stocked it so must have come in via the couple of ducks that visited us every day, from the local nature reserve.

this was about 8/9 years ago, and its still in there today though it rarely gets seen. its around 2/3 pound in weight now.

 

[england]

all long time ago now when i was 18, now 31
i decided to go a work/live in spain for the summer, i emptied my tank, put tank in my sisters garden and off i went on my adventure,
after working for 3.5months we came back to sunny ole england, i got a job here and worked my butt off, came to mid april time, disasembaled tank back in may, i went to tank which was full off rain water,it had been a freezing winter, emptied tank again, when i took out the fake beach shell which was in there, out pops a collie loach swimming around as happy as larry
so theres my fish for cycling the tank had no choice in the matter, left it in a tub in shed for 1day, then moved it into the house then, crept up temp 1c by 1c until i hit 24c, he was fine after his year long break,,,survival of the fittest

collie loaches and trumpets love to hid in the substrate

 

[jourdy288]

That would probably be my copepods, don't always see them, but I'm glad I do!

Oh, nad once I got this insect larva on a plant, but the fish ate it. Another time, I raised a pair of caddisflies.

 

[OldMan47]

Many years ago I got home from vacation and had left a neighbor to feed my fish. When I opened the front door I knew there was trouble. The house smelled of rotting fish food. I drained both tanks and hauled them into the garden to clean them. After I was done using the aquarium gravel to scrub the glass on the tanks and running a hose through the gravel to get it clean I propped the almost empty tanks against the wall of the house and left them there. A few weeks later I decided to set the tanks up again and went out to get them. When they were back in place and refilled with water, I looked into one of the tanks and found several guppies swimming around in it. They had not only survived the extreme water condition that I found when I got home but had lived through me cleaning the tank and the gravel with tap water right out of the hose, then refilling the tank with more tap water. In those days we didn't use dechlorinator but let water sit out to dechlorinate it so they were in untreated tap water. They had also survived a few weeks with no food, no circulation, no filter and no heat. Sometimes I wonder if we don't baby our fish too much.

 

[@ombomb]

if you like surprise guests, you'd love marine, huge amounts of life or various shapes and sizes emerges from live rock

 

[TylerFerretLord]

Right now I have a large colony of copepods and planarians, as well as nematodes(but I don't see them often). They've been flourishing since I had a tank crash a month or two back and lost everything. No predators.

I also had some snails cart in on some moss I picked up at the LFS, but I haven't seen them. I think my weekly 'dosing' of ammonia to keep the biological filter going was too much for them.

 

[Mr._Fishy]

Nothing really to funny has happened to me, but this one person I know got a hitchhiker fish one time. I don't think he ever got an id for it, but it looked a little like a bi color blenny. Some time what comes out of live rock can be pretty surprising!

 

[tHE SCRiBBLEs]

A few months back, I purchased a Bamboo shrimp and put it in my tank. I few weeks later he disappeared and I thought something ate him.Later when I am changing out the filter, I see him sitting right on it! He had been living in total darkness for weeks! I quickly pulled him of off it thinking he had gotten stuck, but in an hour or so he had crawled right back in. So now I leave him in there acting as a mini second filter.