I watched my goldfish choke on a rock
We used to buy bulk baitfish to give to my dad’s Parana. Most of them they’d eat, but every so often we’d get one or two bluegill that just decided they were parana. They’d all move in a pack together, the bluegill would help the Parana hunt, it was crazy.
The wildest thing was eventually the mixed school would eventually start to turn on the smallest as the food fish dwindled. Straight canibalism on the part of the bluegill. Sometimes the bluegill would be too big for the school to finish, so they’d eat the back half and the front would still be swimming with the gang like it wasn’t just yesterday’s dinner.
I used to have these two cichlids in a community tank we dubbed dumb and dumber. Dumber did all the bad stuff, and dumb usually followed. Jumping out of the tank, getting suctioned to the filter intake, hitting the glass lid hard enough to knock one of them unconscious…the list is long
FINALLY, one of them managed to go full zoomies, knock an aquatic potted plant over (about a 2qt flower pot) such that it flipped upside down empty of all plants and dirt.
I discovered dumb trapped inside the upside down now empty pot, and dumber dead having been pinned at the gills by the pot. I’ve seen fish wiggle out of worse situations, that fish was just REALLY dumb. Cichlids are smart fish!
This is the story of Dave the fish. We were a group of young students, all around 18 or so.
Dave… My housemate bought a bunch of fish for the house. Cichlids, zebra fish etc. And we also ended up Dave. The pet shop guy threw him in for free, because he didn’t know what type of fish he was. He was a small, generic silver fish, about the size of a zebrafish, but without their colouring.
Anyway, within a day or two of getting the fish tank set up at the house, Dave jumped out of the tank and landed on the floor! He laid on the floor for so long he was partially stiff by the time we found him.
We put him back in the tank, and he sank straight to the bottom without moving. We were looking for the net to get him out of the tank again when his gills started to move. He didn’t move, but he was breathing, so we left him there.
The next day, he was fine, and you wouldn’t have known anything had happened.
Within a year or so, every other fish in that tank died, but not Dave. So when we moved house, someone put him in a glass spaghetti container, with a sealed lid (something like this ) to make it easy to transport him.
When we got there, we put his (sealed) spaghetti container on a shelf, whilst we got the new house sorted out. And we then kinda forget he was there… Months later, while we were moving things around, we discovered this spaghetti container. It was still sealed closed, and so lined with algae, we couldn’t see anything inside the container. And we remembered that was the container we used for Dave, so we opened it up, to clean out whatever remained of Dave.
Except Dave was still alive. Still doing fine. Despite being sealed in a spaghetti jar for months, untouched, unfed, with no water replacement.
By this point, we had started to realise that Dave was unkillable. But his troubles don’t end there… Because our lease on the house ended, and it was time to move again. But this time, we all went our own way, and some of us to another city. But when we talked later, none of us had Dave. He didn’t make it to any of the new places we were all living.
I like to imagine that all these years later, he’s still living quite happily in his spaghetti jar, planning on outliving us all…
Those first four words caused me to mentally rap this to the Fresh Prince theme.
Clearly Dave died, passed into the afterlife, lost a game of chance to a demon and was forced into a deal for his soul, and ended up cursed with immortality.
He died the first time, he just didn’t realize it and kept swimming along
Not necessarily dumb, but I had a harlequin rasbora that loved to lay down on anubias leaves. Like, fully horizontal. I can’t tell you how many times I thought it was dead and went to remove it, only for it to swim off when I got close with the net.
It wasn’t sick. It didn’t have any swim bladder issues. The little jerk just spent years pranking me for seemingly no reason.
Still one of my favorite fish.
Little thing just needed a nap.
Decided to swim through a hole in a sunken ship decoration that was too small ending up causing lethal wounds along his body that took days to kill him.
I miss my bala shark.
He was kidnapped bc he touched the butt. I had to go all the way to 42 Wallaby Way, Sydney, Australia to find him after that and Ellen DeGeneres wouldn’t stfu the entire way there 😮💨
Went after a worm on a hook, easily the biggest mistake of many fishes lives.
Relatable
It fell for a fishing mail.
Swimming in water. Fish piss in it.
