When you are setting up your first tank, or your first tank this month, you are excited about all of the new and exciting aquatic life and thinking about all the great times you’re going to have with the new aquarium. What you generally don’t think about is that our hobby involves living creatures, and every fish you ever get will die, this is a harsh truth but it’s part of aquarium keeping.
Hopefully our pet fish will live long healthy lives and pass away peacefully of natural causes at a ripe old age. But on a long enough timeline, a lot of things can go wrong with our carefully managed water worlds. Fish can jump out, get sick, get beat up by other fish, and of course, sometimes equipment failures can cause catastrophic tank crashes.
Some casualties are accidents, many others are avoidable, and it’s this latter category that causes the most painful sting when we lose a prized fish or coral due to different choices that could have been made. If you keep aquariums long enough, some pieces of your equipment will fail, and it doesn’t matter if you have the best, most expensive pump or a rinky dink private labeled pump from walmart – at some point, any device with moving parts will break.
This is a fact of life that aquarists generally don’t speak about, and when we do, it’s generally in anger about how they will never use this or that piece of equipment. However, we’ve never seen the topic of the loss of precious aquarium animals discussed as wisely, and methodically, as in this recent video from King of DIY.
In April of last year, a single Cobalt Neotherm heater malfunctioned, and some of its internal material was introduced into his specially built stingray and arowana aquarium. Unfortunately, the burned plastic and resin of the faulty heater is toxic to stingrays, and the stingrays were dead before he could do anything to reverse the damage. And we’re not talking about just any kind of stingray, these were Leopoldi Stingrays some strains of which are called Black Diamonds, and the holy grail of freshwater rays for aquariums.
Despite this huge loss, he took more than half a year to come to terms with this traumatic event, and really gave the situation some serious consideration. This video from Joey is one of the wisest, and most profound accounts of aquarium casualty that we have ever seen, in person or in video. We think it is important to be aware that aquarium crashes happen, and on some level we just have to be prepared for what may eventually occur.
We have an immense amount of respect for Joey on speaking so candidly and wisely about this rarely mentioned topic. It takes a lot of guts and class to speak on the issue the way he did, and we hope that this video will help others who have experienced similar losses in the past, or those who might in the future. [King of DIY]
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