lost some babies in two accidents
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
We lost two baby goldfish this morning. The problem came in the form of filter violence.
I've been running a sponge filter from day one. Easily the most fry-safe filtration option, but only really good for biological filtration. It does some small amount of physical filtration, but with so many fish there's a constant need for physical filtration. So I have been playing with designs also fueled by air bubbles: usually involving stuffing filter media in a coke bottle and running the bubbles up a tube through the lid.
But these designs have a problem: I'll be attending a leadership-team off-site for four days next week, and am then leaving for Fukuoka the full week after that. I will not be around to tease out the filter media and replace it. So I bought a power head, and built a design involving another coke bottle stuffed with media as the intake. Even on its lowest setting, this proved too strong, however, and several fish wound up caught in the intake bottle for an hour or two. I noticed the problem and freed them, but the fish were badly damaged. They'd been so furious in trying to swim out of the bottle that they'd torn up their tails - leaving just a stub in each case.
I scrapped the ¥1,400 power head and went back to a coke bottle design. But to make it easier to clean in my absence, this design had an open end stuffed with media. This morning I came down to find that a dozen fish had tried swimming down into the media. By the time I got them out, two had succumbed to what was probably hours in that trap -- one had been way down in the rocks that I use to weight the thing, and I suspect it was physically injured as I tried to rescue it.
I'm now back on the safe-but-hard-to-clean model and will have to let the filter fill up with crud while I'm absent.