Fishy (mis)Adventures Part II - Trout Rapture

One fish, two fish, dead fish....*sigh*.....

Recall from Part I, when we decided to take out a few fish to eat, my thought was, "what can it hurt?"  Well, apparently, it can hurt a lot.

The next day, January 4, I found a floater in the tank.  I don't know what caused the fish's death.  In reading about humanely treating fish, I came across a lot of catch-and-release articles.  A couple of things I learned - first, try not to take the fish out of the water at all.  It's like suffocating them.  Next, if you must handle the fish, make sure your hands are wet.  If you touch a fish with dry hands, you are effectively "burning" the fish by removing some of its protective slime.  Also, the protective slime is part of the fish's immune system, so besides causing the fish pain, you are damaging its immune system.  I read on several different sites, that often, if you release a fish and don't handle it properly, it might swim away, so you think the fish is going to live, but it actually swims away and ends up dying.  See photo below.  Note that this is on a standard-size dinner plate (10" or 12"? I'm too lazy to go measure it).

Big Dead Fish

Knowing that, when we removed the fish from the water, we tried to put the ones we were going to eat back into the water immediately.  Also, we did not touch the fish with our hands.  I don't know what caused this fish to die.  Maybe it was just shock.  But, it turns out, it was about twice the size of any of the fish we ate!  I think it was the granddaddy trout in our tank. 

OK, so one fish down.  I think I should be down to 30 or 31 fish at this point, so everything is still good, right?

Wrong.

Today, I go down to take care of the dogs, and there are FOUR dead fish floating around.  And a sort-of-alive one hovering near the top of the tank.  The nitrate levels are off the charts.  The water level was a little low, so I added some water, but the nitrite levels were still out of range of my little chart, so I did a 50% water change.  During the water change, yet ANOTHER dead fish comes floating by....AHHHH!!!  Frustration.

The only "good" thing about today's experience is that it has been unseasonably warm all week, with today being the warmest day yet.  It was about 65-70 degrees outside today, so at least I didn't have to do this in subfreezing temperatures.  It's a rather wet and messy process.  It did, however, take me three tries before I found a hose that wasn't frozen, but at least I didn't have to carry the water into the house in buckets.  My back is too old for that kind of work. 

Anyway, here's another picture of fish carcasses.  :-(

This is starting to seem like a rather morbid blog....

More Floaters

Now here's where the trout rapture comes in....this is weird.  My son and I were shining the light in the tank, and it seems like there are only two fish swimming around!  Hopefully, the rest are just so healthy and fast that they're avoiding the light every time we move it and hiding in the corner (is there a corner in an oval tank?  whatever).  Usually, we can see a bunch of fish shadows swimming around, but now we only see a couple, so my son is convinced the other fish have been raptured. 

I still don't know exactly what happened, but I'm guessing one fish died of shock and floated in the water long enough to contaminate the water and kill the other fish.  I just checked the nitrite level again, and although it's a lot higher than it should be, at least it seems to have gone down a lot since the water change.  I'm hoping that if I don't feed them for a day or two, the level will stabilize.

On a happier note, my plants are still alive.  Actually, I don't know that I would call the plants "happy," but they are alive.  They're a little yellow, and growing really slowly, but they are still alive.  If I decide to continue with this, I will have to come up with an artificial light solution.  Here are a couple of pictures taken January 3.  I think I planted the seeds at least two months ago, so you can see that the growth is extremely slow.  I think if I had planted these outside in June, they would be about this size within a week or two.

The good thing is that I didn't lose very many plants when we had the super-sub-zero temperatures a few weeks ago.  There is a gap in the dog door that lets in raw, cold air, and I was afraid it would freeze my plants.  I think it got down to about 40 degrees Fahrenheit, so it was pretty close. 

Bed 1 - Strawberries on the Right, Lettuce and Herbs on the Left

Bed 2 - Sickly Tomato Plant and Some Broccoli and Herbs

Well, that's about it for now.  Not much excitement this winter until recently, so there really wasn't anything to report.  Hopefully the next update will have better news!

Thanks for stopping by!  :-)