Ask Lemmy

Had a rasbora which jumped out of the tank. Woke up one morning and found him on the ground, still alive. Put him back in the tank and got a lid. Little guy is still alive years later!

We had a male betta that played dead. Dozens of times we thought he was done, only to tap the glass and see him scurry away.

He liked to float upside down. He liked to wedge himself between the filter intake and the tank so he didn't have to swim to get water flowing over his gills. He'd just sit on the bottom on the gravel for hours.

Strange guy. When he finally died, we didn't believe it until he started rotting. Figured he was just committed to the bit when he stopped eating.

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.

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...

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!

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.

I watched my goldfish choke on a rock

It fell for a fishing mail.

Went after a worm on a hook, easily the biggest mistake of many fishes lives.

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 😮‍💨

Shadup

Swimming in water. Fish piss in it.