Thursday, February 05, 2009

Oh no

I am guilty of fishicide. Or perhaps it's just fishslaughter. It certainly wasn't intentional.

Spyder's betta, Blaze, had been looking sickly for a few days. Tonight I decided that perhaps his water needed to be changed. I got the bowl ready, changing the water, putting in the drops to make the water safe and moved him in. For a while he was looking ... not better but at least more energetic. I left him alone to do his swimmy thing for about half an hour, so I could accomplish a few nighttime chores. When I went back to check on him, he was on the bottom of the bowl.

I really don't even know what happened. I follow the instructions on the care sheets closely. The only thing that I did differently was move him into the new water sooner than I usually do. On all of our previous water changes, I always waited a while before moving him into the new water -- at least 45 minutes -- and this time I only waited about 20 minutes. Or maybe he was more sickly than I thought?

I have no idea, but I feel horrible.

And tomorrow morning there will be keening wails from the children when they find out, and I will feel freshly horrible all over again.


Noodle4

7 comments:

PEZmama said...

:-( I'm sorry about the fish. You know it may not be that you did anything wrong, but I know you feel bad just the same.

Hope the kids are doing okay.

smalltownme said...

We had two bettas. Had. One's belly bloated up. The other lost its tail. Seriously. One day it had a tail, the next it was gone.

Anonymous said...

Please pass my condolences on to your family. We recently lost TWO fish, one my daughters, one mine. I've wondered how long my daughter's would last since she is not very good at keeping to a schedule of changing water or feeding. But they did last a year and a half and that's a long time for a fish!

Vanessa said...

I'm so sorry. The fish was likely sicker than realized. I've had many many beta in my life and sometimes they fool you into thinking they are ok when really they are not.

Anonymous said...

oh dear. I don't know about fish, but I've always been under the impression that they don't have very long lives anyway.

The aquatic frogs Sophia gave me for Christmas died a few weeks ago. No idea why. She hasn't noticed that they're gone. I'm hoping she never does.

Tina said...

Bless your heart!! I hope those sweet kiddos of yours did well with the news...

Anonymous said...

I believe an update is in order. How did they handle the news?