Near catastrophe!

[Odd Duck]

After a day of minor tank piddling, organizing a bit, taking new pics of my mossy branches, I sat down to rest a bit and was about to heat up some of yesterday’s pizza for supper.  The hubs went back into the bedroom with my rack and came back out saying something sounded awful back there.  I happened to have some mixed water in my mixing barrel so I grabbed grabbed it thinking I had let one of my 10 G’s get a little low.  Some aren’t fully covered and evaporate pretty quickly.  One was on the low side this morning at feeding and it’s the worst one for evap.

Hauled the barrel back there and realized it was not the “low” tank but it certainly was “a” low tank.  One of my QT tanks had sprung a leak and drained down to 1.5” of water!  The biggest problem being that’s one of the tanks that has 2” of matten filter over an undergravel filter.  My poor false juliis (Corydoras trilineatus) were laying on their sides on wet foam!

Grabbed each one and plopped them straight into the tank next to it which has a 6 pack of sterbai cories and a 6 pack of very young tiger silver dollars in it.  Now plus a 7 pack of trilineatus.  Not ideal, but they’re all alive and seem to be no worse for wear.  I just got the poor cories yesterday!  I’ll be doing a water change on that tank tomorrow as long as I’m not crazy late getting home from work.  It’s more than I wanted in that tank, for sure.

I’ve now got my old 12 G tank set up in place of the leaking tank but I wasn’t going to chase all the cories around tonight after they all just barely went into QT yesterday evening.  The silver dollars are done with QT on Monday.  I don’t usually overlap QT time (I usually restart everybody’s QT if I put any new fish into the same tank, which I don’t usually do), but the cories I got from a friend that has very clean tanks, he’s had no illnesses, and they were never chilled, bagged with plenty of water and air, 13 small cories in 4 good sized bags, etc, etc.  As long as everybody looks good tomorrow I’m going to risk pulling the dollars out so the cories have the tank to themselves.

I’ll have to separate the cories when I put them in their respective 100 G tanks.  The sterbais are going in with angelfish and the trilineatus are going in the 100 G nanofish tank with another trilineatus I rescued when I got the 100 G that’s becoming the angel tank.  In the mean time, they can all commiserate and tell each other all their cory stories about their near death experience.  🤦🏻‍♀️ 

First 2 pics are on the underside of the matten foam with roots poking all the way through from a couple Nymphea stellata bulbs.  This tank only got put together around March 1st so this was not quite 3 weeks growth through brand new matten foam.

Third pic is what it looks like to have a 12 G next to a 10 G.  Same footprint, difference is all in the height.

Last pic is a closeup of the thickness of the glass with the 12 G on the left with black seals, red line marking the thickness of the glass.  The 10 G tank on the right with blue line marking the glass thickness and this is also an older tank.  I have other 10 G, newer tanks that have even thinner glass.  It’s hard to find thicker glass in small tanks these days.

 

[Guppysnail]

I’m so sorry about your tank.  I’m glad everyone made it. My heart would have stopped. That is some great root growth for only a few weeks. I’m wondering how the foam would do for a plant grow out then just cut the foam around the roots in a circle to plant in a tank foam and all so you don’t disturb the roots?  (Still hooked on this crypt thing 🤣)

I wonder if cory stories evolve from near death experience to “son let me tell you about the day the earth stood still”?

[PineSong]

Yikes! Nice recovery. I like the idea of the 12g— more space with the same footprint is nice!

[AndreaW]

Glad you caught it in time to save the Cories and glad you had another tank nearby to transfer them to. Phew!

Those look like happy roots! You are definitely doing something right to have growth that quickly. That is interesting to see the difference between the two tanks. 

[lefty o]

that sucks. at least they stayed damp. fish are pretty resilient sometimes, as long as the gills stay wet.

[Odd Duck]

On 3/20/2022 at 9:52 AM, Guppysnail said:

I’m so sorry about your tank.  I’m glad everyone made it. My heart would have stopped. That is some great root growth for only a few weeks. I’m wondering how the foam would do for a plant grow out then just cut the foam around the roots in a circle to plant in a tank foam and all so you don’t disturb the roots?  (Still hooked on this crypt thing 🤣)

I wonder if cory stories evolve from near death experience to “son let me tell you about the day the earth stood still”?

I will be ordering tanks tomorrow after I can have a good look at all of them.  On sale a big box right now.  12 G will go back to being the back up (unless I go for the carnivorous plant/moss tank).  But I will make sure I always have a back up.  I’m not one to be prone to panic, but you can bet I was yelling for help when I realized what was happening.

I was very surprised to see that much root development considering these are bulbs that haven’t shown me impressive growth, even when they were sitting on sand capped dirt.  They got roots ripped off last night, though in my hurry to sort things out.

And I can totally picture the cories in a little cory huddle like they do, telling fishy tales!  All seem none the worse for wear today, eating just fine, doing happy cory things.

Tank params are perfect tonight despite the “crowd” in the tank, but it does have about 40 G worth of filtration on that 10 G.  😆 I have good reason for using a 20 G sponge plus a 20 G HOB.  I’m paranoid!

The silver dollars are getting out of QT tomorrow, so then the load will be fine.

On 3/20/2022 at 10:39 PM, PineSong said:

Yikes! Nice recovery. I like the idea of the 12g— more space with the same footprint is nice!

Hard to find as they aren’t a standard size.  This tank was purchased back in late ‘98!  It has loads of fine scratches, some adhesive residue from having a coir fiber mat siliconed to the inside back when it was going to be a dart frog tank (couldn’t find a reliable source for captive bred back then so I gave up on the idea), and has a rigged pump since the original has long since given up.

On 3/20/2022 at 10:56 PM, AndreaW said:

Glad you caught it in time to save the Cories and glad you had another tank nearby to transfer them to. Phew!

Those look like happy roots! You are definitely doing something right to have growth that quickly. That is interesting to see the difference between the two tanks. 

Yep.  If dear hubby hadn’t gone back in that bedroom, it would have been too late.  I just happened to have an old HOB running on the tank just to keep the filter foam alive and seeded, and it was out of water and screeching which is what triggered investigation and realization of the near catastrophe.

That old tank has been a solid performer, but the hood is bulky and outdated.  I’ve kept it because it would be a perfect platform for a fish surgery if needed with only slight modification to pumps and tubing. I’ll be keeping it as a back up but probably get it ready with the equipment needed so it can be ready for surgery immediately.  I’ve been meaning to do that for years, so it’s past due.  I have what I need, I just need to put it together as a kit and get a bag or box to store it inside the tank and ready to go.  If it wasn’t too tall to easily work inside while in the rack, I might keep it running.  But it’s great as an emergency back up.

On 3/20/2022 at 11:17 PM, lefty o said:

that sucks. at least they stayed damp. fish are pretty resilient sometimes, as long as the gills stay wet.

Fish are tougher than we think, usually.  There were a couple that weren’t moving very much last night when I picked them up, but all swam immediately after the plops and all doing well this morning and tonight.  Whew!  The water was still draining out when I went back there and draining fast, so it couldn’t have been going on for long.  They were probably only out of water for a few minutes at the rate the water was draining.