What’s the scariest moment in your fish keeping experience?

[Connor Elliott]

For me today my killifish jumped out of the tank while I was changing the water but I saved him and he’s doing fine.😅

[FrozenFins]

In my first year of keeping fish my 10 gallon exploded. Luckily it exploded at lunch time and I was home at lunch (in fact that day I was thinking about staying at school for lunch, but I'm sure glad I didn't) I came home and went to my room, WATER was EVERYWHERE! Luckily I had a plan if this happend. I quickly grabbed all my fish and put them in buckets of dechlorinated water, then I put a towel over it so my cats wouldn't grab a snack. Then got all the towels in the house and started wiping up the water. 

Later that day I went to the LFS and got another 10 gallon, and re-set it up. Luckly most of my fish survived. I only had one corydora that died not from being out water though. I woke up the next morning and he was lying on his side, I assume its because of all the stress that happend to him that day. 

[Connor Elliott]

48 minutes ago, James Black said:

In my first year of keeping fish my 10 gallon exploded. Luckily it exploded at lunch time and I was home at lunch (in fact that day I was thinking about staying at school for lunch, but I'm sure glad I didn't) I came home and went to my room, WATER was EVERYWHERE! Luckily I had a plan if this happend. I quickly grabbed all my fish and put them in buckets of dechlorinated water, then I put a towel over it so my cats wouldn't grab a snack. Then got all the towels in the house and started wiping up the water. 

Later that day I went to the LFS and got another 10 gallon, and re-set it up. Luckly most of my fish survived. I only had one corydora that died not from being out water though. I woke up the next morning and he was lying on his side, I assume its because of all the stress that happend to him that day. 

Jeez I’m sorry that happened that sucks ☹️

[OnlyGenusCaps]

I was working in an LFS in high school.  One Saturday morning it was just me and the store manager, Jeff.  This dude knew his stuff!  I watched him perform surgery saving a multi-thousand dollar koi.  He was amazing!  But I digress.  So, this was a pretty quiet morning before we opened.  We were going around and doing our standard checks, and I was about to start cleaning the algae off the display sides of the tanks for opening when I smelled something.  Smoke.  I yelled to Jeff "Hey, so you smell smoke?" He came running asking me where it was coming from.  I didn't know.  So, the hunt was on.  We started walking around to try to find out what was happening.  I came down and aisle to the salt section, and in the service walk between the salt tanks, I saw smoke!  So, I yelled to Jeff "Here!  Here!"  Running over, Jeff headed straight toward the smoke, and just at that moment little molten, red balls of salt? sodium?, something from the deposits that had formed in the not often visited service area started flying off and meting the carpet as they hit.  Jeff runs up and realizes it is a coming from a cord covered in salt.  He looks at me, a high school student, and says "If I drop, call 9-1-1."  He then proceeds to jump into the air while simultaneously pulling the plug for the cord from the outlet.  Immediately, things visibly cool down.  Still loads of smoke from the cord, and the now smoldering carpet.  We proceed to put water on the carpet, and open the doors on both sides.  Only after that do I notice Jeff has quite a burn on his hand.  I called the owner telling them to get in, and pressured Jeff to go to a clinic.  That was almost certainly my scariest moment in fish keeping.

[OnlyGenusCaps]

Sorry @Connor Elliott , at this point I sort of feel like I accidentally killed what could have been a fun thread.  I feel badly about that. 

[Jeff]

Many moons ago (2005-06), I set up my first ever tank: community 60 gallon tank, filtered by two HOBs. 
 

Came home from driving my friends home from the bar late one Saturday evening and turned on the light in my kitchen...which semi illuminated my Family Room. 

I see this dark spot in the middle of the rug in my family room (where the tank was).  As I got closer and closer...I see my Fiddler Crab crawling around. 

Scared the ba-jeezies out of me. 

That was the beginning of the end of being in my tank. Back to the LFS he went. 
 

 

 

[AnimalNerd98]

Back in high school, I was inspired by The King of DIY and Cory’s 5 gallon bucket filter video and decided to make one for my turtle tank. I used mostly scrubbies for the media, but on the top, I had a plastic colander lined with some Poly-Fil. I patted myself on the back and set it up. The next morning, I hear my dad yelling from the main floor to get downstairs quick. I run down and find the dining room area flooded with about a 1/4 inch of water. Apparently, it also started leaking down into the basement. Turns out, the PolyFil got clogged from a single day’s worth of turtle poop, backed up, flowed out of the bucket, dripping down the sides, onto the ground where all the power cords were. I’m surprised my dad let me keep the turtles and my revised DIY filter which I watched like a hawk every hour for the next week 😂 

Edited May 19, 2021 by AnimalNerd98

[Stealth Aquatics]

So I have an aquarist fail, but I’m sharing this out of my amazement. I received 6 black schultzei corys in the mail today. All alive. Acclimated them to temp and went to do the plop and drop. I put them in the tank and they all scurry like normal. I come back an hour later and can only find 5. I’m looking everywhere and can’t find the last one. I deal with my kids and get dinner started and I’m like I know I saw 6 in the bag, where is that last guy. 
 

I throughly check the tank and only see 5, so I go to the trash and look at the bags they came in, and I was expecting a dead fish that I didn’t see when emptying the bags, well THIS LITTLE DUDE WAS STUCK UNDER THE TAPED EDGES TO MAKE THE BAG SQUARE.  And there was a little bit of water, but he was ALIVE. I couldn’t believe it because it had been 3 hours at this point since I put them in the tank. I hurried and put him in the tank and he did fine, it’s now been 3 hours since he was out in the tank and he is still breathing and moving around. I will monitor. 
 

i feel terrible about this. I should have caught it. The only thing I can think of as to why he is still alive is because corys can absorb oxygen through their gut. 
 

it’s either that story, or when I was losing my red tuxedo koi colony to something that I couldn’t figure out. Meds and everything wouldn’t save them. So I put a sick momma in a breeder box and hoped she made it long enough to give birth. She did and then died a few days later and now I still have that colony of guppies. 

[mgudyka]

I am still pretty new to this hobby so I haven't had a lot happen, but I haven't been entirely spared. After my tank was set up for weeks and got cycled, I finally got some fish in my tank. I was thrilled. One week later, my husband has to go to work very early in the morning. It is 4am, I am asleep in bed, he kisses me good bye and says "there is a lot of water on the floor down here (the basement), I think your tank is leaking." What he says doesn't really hit me for a hot sec since I was basically still asleep. I groggily get up and as I walk out into the basement living room, I step in water. The first thing I think is that one of the dogs peed on the floor but then remember oh yeah the tank. I go upstairs to see that the water level has dropped several inches in my tank. I inspect the walls of the aquarium, the edges, the rim, anything for a sign of some sort of breach, but the tank is completely dry. Then I notice the wall behind it is wet and I discover that one of the hoses on my canister filter is leaking. In my semi-lucid state, I am somewhat satisfied with the discovery, unplug the filter so it stops running and stops leaking, and go back to sleep. 

When I wake up I have to deal with the reality of the all the water that leaked from my upstairs dining room into my downstairs basement. Thankfully I only had a 29 gallon running at the time so I was able to sop up all the water with most of my towels. Good thing it was laundry day. I still had to contend with the leaking hose situation. I tried every remedy I could think of to patch it up. Super glue didn't work. Duct tape didn't work. Flex tape didn't work. The stupid hose is ribbed so none of my solutions were working. I tried to get some flex caulk delivered to my house but it never showed up. After a couple of hours of being upset about this and worried about my fish and the bacteria I spent weeks establishing, it finally occurred to me that I could just trim the hose down past where the puncture was. Don't know why I didn't think of that first! It ended up working just fine and I have not had any problems since.

This was not an all-bad situation however. Apparently my gourami are hyperaware of water levels and the low water level triggered my pair to mate. I didn't even know I had a male and female at the time. They successfully mated and hatched several eggs. Unfortunately my red phantom tetras ate every last one of them all up. I was unprepared to rear fry anyway.

Thanks for reading haha

[Tanked]

I was in the process of moving my 75 gallon about two feet to make room for another 75.  while looking for an extension cord downstairs,  I heard a crash, falling objects and a lot of commotion.  Expecting the worse, I ran up the steps only to find that the largest of my Tinfoil Barbs had jumped out of 30 gallon tote, survived the 5 ft. freefall, and had flopped it's way in to the next room.

Almost two years later, the fish is alive and well, and performing other acrobatic tricks.  ...in the aquarium.

[H.K.Luterman]

I'm lucky that I haven't had any major scares up until a few months ago, and I hope it's a rare occurrence. But the scenario was that I have two senegal bichirs, one is a big, beefy 8in+ boy (named Dragon), and the other at the time was a roughly 4in adolescent (named Dinky). I had read on the internet conflicting stories about how often to feed adult bichirs, some saying that to keep them lean, they feed every other day. Dragon is a chonker, and he's very used to eating at least once a day, sometimes twice, and I thought that maybe since he's so beefy he should have a little diet. So I switched him to eating every other day, but continued feeding the other inhabitants of the tank once or twice daily.

WELL, one evening after dinner time, I was surfing the web when I hear a loud SPLASH behind me. I turned around and Dragon had Dinky's pectoral nubbin (bichirs have lobe fins) in his mouth! He shook Dinky a little, but then released him, while I was running to the tank. I proceeded to have a minor coronary, and quickly netted Dinky out and put him in the quarantine bin (I think I still had it running empty for some reason, which was very lucky). I stared long and hard at him, but he was OK! His fin seemed a bit sore for an hour, and he didn't use it, but he recovered quick. It wasn't red or even torn. 

I figure that it wasn't mean-spirited. I think maybe the smell of food was still in the tank, and Dragon was hungry, and so being very near sighted he snapped at a white thing that went by his face (I feed frozen tilapia a lot which is white colored, and Dinky is also white colored). Since then I always feed Dragon whenever I feed everyone else, and decided he can just be pleasantly plump. Dinky is doing great and had grown a lot since this incident, so I'm fairly confident that any danger has passed. They still like to pal around with each other too.

Here's a pic of the two of them around the time of the incident. Dinky was so tiny back then.

 

Here's a recent pic of the Dinkster.

[Griznatch]

Wow,  sooo many...

Having an amano shrimp run up my arm when cleaning the HOB on my 75 gallon. Moving the 75 gallon from my shop where i leak tested it to my house. Hate moving that much glass, paranoid about leaks.

Waking up in middle of night and hearing water spraying onto the wall . Long time ago when I had a metal framed slate bottom tank.

Trying to remove a channel catfish from my 100 gallon tank. I had drained the tank down to about 10 inches and wrapped him in a towel. This guy was huge, he could barely turn around in the tank. Anyhow I got him just past the rim of the tank, and he exploded out of the towel, smacked me in the face and proceeded to try and escape out of the living room lol. Finally got him in a large cooler and to a display tank in a local fish store. No worse for the wear I might add. That feeling of him being airborne and getting smacked in the face is funny now, but pretty scary when it happened.

Moving an all glass 100 gallon tank 3 times... as a youngster my worries were mostly losing the tank or the fish. As a homeowner there's no greater fear than water damage... 100 gallons is a LOT , heck I freak out if I think a 10 gallon tank is gonna leak.

Having my Oscar break the aquarium lid in that 100 gallon (also home of the channel cat). that was the point I had to rehome those two
 

[Jeannie]

I'm new to this hobby. I've just started a 100L tank but have a 25L tank with Amano shrimp. When I first got the five of them home and acclimated them and released them from the bag (they were pretty small back then) I thought I had counted five coming out of the bag. I placed the bag into my  kitchen sink, admired my tank for a couple of minutes, went to grab the bag to throw it in the bin and found one of the shrimp staring back up at me, hovering right next to the plug hole, never to be seen again. I screamed in horror. Luckily, I just placed my hand next to it and it jumped onto my hand and I quickly placed it in the tank. 

All five shrimp are alive to this day and have grown pretty big.

[Griznatch]

 Those Amanos are not afraid to roam, that's for sure 🙂