Over the years of fish keeping, I have run into some very strange situations. Had a beautiful clown trigger that would not realy eat for nearly a year at the shop. Finally brought the fish home for observation.
Turned out that someone had fed him fish that had a vertebrate. This was now inside his mouth, stuck. Taking medical tools I was able to break the sharp bone, and extract it. Fish lived, gained weight, and we sold him.
I have also had to extract thermometers from catfish... and I wrote about this in the Aquarium magazine a few decades ago.
Recently though I had our 18" tiger shovel nose red tailed hybrid eat an air stone. It was a big air stone... after 5 days, we caught him and after failing to extract it with forceps, used my gloved fingers to take it out. He lived and is quite happy eating everything once again.
This leads me to my last 13 inch tiger shovel nose red tailed hybrid... this idiot ate a huge chunk of lava rock. After 4 days, he was not doing well. So, time for another extraction. This took way to long even though he was in water. How he was able to swallow it, I do not know. But, he did. This time though the extraction ended up killing him after 24 hours.
The upshot of it is this... while we want out tanks to look cool... anything that a catfish will swallow, they will. Our tanks are now policed for objects of danger. We feed small meals often to keep them from going berserker while feeding. If this happens again, we will try to extract the objects, but wow... it is something I have had success with, but I have lost fish that were quite pet like. I feed my fish by hand and interact with them. So loosing one is difficult. But worth the effort to try to save them.
Turned out that someone had fed him fish that had a vertebrate. This was now inside his mouth, stuck. Taking medical tools I was able to break the sharp bone, and extract it. Fish lived, gained weight, and we sold him.
I have also had to extract thermometers from catfish... and I wrote about this in the Aquarium magazine a few decades ago.
Recently though I had our 18" tiger shovel nose red tailed hybrid eat an air stone. It was a big air stone... after 5 days, we caught him and after failing to extract it with forceps, used my gloved fingers to take it out. He lived and is quite happy eating everything once again.
This leads me to my last 13 inch tiger shovel nose red tailed hybrid... this idiot ate a huge chunk of lava rock. After 4 days, he was not doing well. So, time for another extraction. This took way to long even though he was in water. How he was able to swallow it, I do not know. But, he did. This time though the extraction ended up killing him after 24 hours.
The upshot of it is this... while we want out tanks to look cool... anything that a catfish will swallow, they will. Our tanks are now policed for objects of danger. We feed small meals often to keep them from going berserker while feeding. If this happens again, we will try to extract the objects, but wow... it is something I have had success with, but I have lost fish that were quite pet like. I feed my fish by hand and interact with them. So loosing one is difficult. But worth the effort to try to save them.
