« Shrimp, take two... | Main | Mean fish... »
February 23, 2005
Really sneaky shrimp...
Took some time this morning to try to find the flower shrimp that I had put in this tank last week. It's been invisible for the past few days now so I started riffling through the plants in the back of the tank to see if it was hiding there. Finding nothing, I took out the biowheel again to see if it might be hiding there like last time. Still nothing.
With nowhere else to check, I finally lifted the long charcoal filter that sits next to the biowheel and lo and behold, the damn thing had managed to work its way underneath the filter! There's a gap between the bottom of the filter and the bottom of the frame that holds the filter where water flows through and he was sitting pretty under there. Unfortunately while I was trying to scoot him out of there he jumped completely out of the tank and fell into the gap formed by the two bookshelves that this 12 gal tank sits on. Pretty much as close to a no-mans-land as you can get. Only way I could get him back up was to wrap some packing tape around the handle of a broom and try to get him to stick onto it.
Sticking his body didn't seem to work and I didn't want to push too hard in fear of crushing him but eventually the tape managed to snag his antenna and I pulled him up from there. When I dumped him back into the aquarium at first I thought he was dead cause he just floated down legs up. But after a few seconds he scrambled to right himself and now he's sprawled out on a leaf. No doubt waiting for the lights to go off again so he can make another attempt at the filter. Which kinda bites cause I replanted the long brunch of hornwort right in front of the filter output so that he could hang out on it and feel the flow but I guess he likes the darkness of the filter frame better.
Anyway, I hope the lil' dude's ok and I didn't break anything while trying to recover it. Guess we'll find out tomorrow...
Posted by ronin at February 23, 2005 10:53 AM