Last Friday, the family left town for a trip to the West Coast. We spent about 24 hours in Orange County and LA, mainly to attend a relative’s graduation from UCLA. We then drove down to Oceanside and spent the next several days chilling by the ocean.
Before we left, I posted on vacation feeding. (Above explains why no posts in a week.) I did not expect any problems as I had a neighbor come inside and turn on the air conditioning during the hottest part of the day.
Indeed, we returned home to find the AC was on and most of the tanks doing just fine. Except for one surprise. A desert goby tank had probably twelve fishes when we left, but only two when we returned. There were decaying carcasses all over the place and the ammonia level was off the scale high.
Sometimes you get mysteries like this, events that don’t make sense. As I noted in last week’s post, fish can go a long time without feeding, so they didn’t starve. The deaths were not due to the heat as the fish still alive in neighboring tanks can’t take anywhere near the heat the gobies can handle.
That two survived ammonia levels as high as they were is a testament to how resilient these fish are. If I had to select one tank for a major die-off while I was away, this would have been the last tank in line. It doesn’t make sense and I will probably never know what happened.
Fortunately, since these fish are so short lived, forcing me to breed them regularly, I have more than one tank going at any given time due to size differences. But, I’m back to start-over mode and I’ll have to be extremely careful with the next batch of eggs. That won’t be for a while because it seems I have no adult males left.
