So I noticed that my puffer was MIA for a while today. Very uncharacteristic of it, especially at feeding time, so I started investigating. This is a tiny fry of a fish, less than an inch long and no much more than 3/8" in diameter. Plenty of places for it to hide in my tank, but no sign of it anywhere. I'm in the process of building screens for the top of this tank, and started to fear that it jumped out. A careful and tense search all around the tank didn't yield anything. (Whew!) Then I looked in the overflow. Sure enough, the little goofball had squeezed between the weir teeth and was swimming around in the overflow.
Netting the little guy out of there didn't seem like a good plan because at 24" high, I could barely reach the bottom with a net, and the 3 pipes in there make it difficult to maneuver.
I did a quick search on here, and someone had suggested closing the drain valves and filling the tank up higher than the overflow weir so the fish can swim out. I don't have that much head room between the top of the weir and the top of the tank, but I do have two sections of weir that I opened up wider so I could run my loc-line return pipes out into the tank. Great! Lets lift up the return lines to open up those "Doors" and flood the tank. Good plan!
Then one of my clown fish swam in through the new opening.
Sure enough, both of them are swimming around in the overflow looking up at me saying "Hey dad, this is a really neat club house you built us!"
So I did what any father would do. Fed the kids and pondered how I was going to fix this before their mother got home!
Ultimately I ended up siphoning out all but about an inch of water. That confined them enough that I could net them. Ungrateful little snots are just swimming around now like nothing ever happened...
Netting the little guy out of there didn't seem like a good plan because at 24" high, I could barely reach the bottom with a net, and the 3 pipes in there make it difficult to maneuver.
I did a quick search on here, and someone had suggested closing the drain valves and filling the tank up higher than the overflow weir so the fish can swim out. I don't have that much head room between the top of the weir and the top of the tank, but I do have two sections of weir that I opened up wider so I could run my loc-line return pipes out into the tank. Great! Lets lift up the return lines to open up those "Doors" and flood the tank. Good plan!
Then one of my clown fish swam in through the new opening.
Sure enough, both of them are swimming around in the overflow looking up at me saying "Hey dad, this is a really neat club house you built us!"
So I did what any father would do. Fed the kids and pondered how I was going to fix this before their mother got home!
Ultimately I ended up siphoning out all but about an inch of water. That confined them enough that I could net them. Ungrateful little snots are just swimming around now like nothing ever happened...
