This is a new one on me... never seen or heard of this happening.
For about a week we'd been smelling something weird around the house. It wasn't clear what the smell was or where it was coming from. We looked all over the house, including the fish room, trying to find the smell to no avail. We went away for two days, and came back to find one of the tanks in the fish-room crashing. The tank in question was a 20g grow out tank with 4x 3-4" poly's and a pleco. One of the poly's, a gold-dust, had managed to get over the top lip of the sponge filter lift-tube and was stuck in the lift-tube. I guess he was in there thrashing and dislodged the air-line tube and then was in there for a while. When we did finally see what was happening the fish in the lift-tube was basically disintegrating and the bubbles blurping out of the air-line were taking fish pieces up the lift-tube and into the tank. The tank went anoxic enough due to decomposition that the pleco died (I guess). The other three poly's in the tank survived but were not happy when we found them (clearly).
I'm not quite sure how this happened. There is a gap of about 1cm between the lid and the top of the lift tube... the gold-dust babies we have are certainly less than 1 cm in diameter, so that gap is big enough for them to fit through and then into the tube. When the tank is full, the lift tube is just below the surface and we usually let the tank go for two weeks between big WC's. The evaporation over that two weeks will bring the top lip of the lift-tube slightly over the water-level. I'd never considered this as an issue because I figured that the current in the lift tube would lift debris/fish back out of the tube.
So I guess I need to do some combination of 1) use a smaller sponge filter(s), 2) reduce the lift-tube height, 3) screen off the top of lift-tube? What would you do to keep small poly's out of the lift-tube?
For about a week we'd been smelling something weird around the house. It wasn't clear what the smell was or where it was coming from. We looked all over the house, including the fish room, trying to find the smell to no avail. We went away for two days, and came back to find one of the tanks in the fish-room crashing. The tank in question was a 20g grow out tank with 4x 3-4" poly's and a pleco. One of the poly's, a gold-dust, had managed to get over the top lip of the sponge filter lift-tube and was stuck in the lift-tube. I guess he was in there thrashing and dislodged the air-line tube and then was in there for a while. When we did finally see what was happening the fish in the lift-tube was basically disintegrating and the bubbles blurping out of the air-line were taking fish pieces up the lift-tube and into the tank. The tank went anoxic enough due to decomposition that the pleco died (I guess). The other three poly's in the tank survived but were not happy when we found them (clearly).
I'm not quite sure how this happened. There is a gap of about 1cm between the lid and the top of the lift tube... the gold-dust babies we have are certainly less than 1 cm in diameter, so that gap is big enough for them to fit through and then into the tube. When the tank is full, the lift tube is just below the surface and we usually let the tank go for two weeks between big WC's. The evaporation over that two weeks will bring the top lip of the lift-tube slightly over the water-level. I'd never considered this as an issue because I figured that the current in the lift tube would lift debris/fish back out of the tube.
So I guess I need to do some combination of 1) use a smaller sponge filter(s), 2) reduce the lift-tube height, 3) screen off the top of lift-tube? What would you do to keep small poly's out of the lift-tube?
