V1K
Well, I made my first rookie mistake yesterday... I changed a sponge of my internal canister filter to a thicker one, since it wasn't doing proper mechanical filtration, and despite my filter having a separate compartment with ceramic media for biological filtration, I left the old sponge lying near the filter "just in case". This morning I noticed two of my rosy barbs, T'Ana and Flash, missing. Apparently these dumbos got themselves stuck inside the sponge. Flash is fine, but T'Ana lost top third of her tail. So far she seems agile enough to avoid further nipping, but she gets tired more easily and sets to rest on the bottom. She's the fattest of the females and has always been the centre of the males' attention. Them chasing her always looks pretty violent, but until now she always ended up with fast healing splits. I don't have another cycled tank, and I think that quarantining her in an uncycled 4 gallon bucket is more dangerous than leaving her in the tank, but I'm not sure. What should I do?
Edit: I realized that the old sponge hasn't dried out yet, so I cut it and stuffed inside the tiny emergency filter that I have and turned that filter on in the main tank in case I need to move the fish, but I'm still not sure if the stress of being moved to a small bucket isn't worse than being chased around in a familiar environment. What do you think?
Edit: I realized that the old sponge hasn't dried out yet, so I cut it and stuffed inside the tiny emergency filter that I have and turned that filter on in the main tank in case I need to move the fish, but I'm still not sure if the stress of being moved to a small bucket isn't worse than being chased around in a familiar environment. What do you think?