Predicted but unwanted end to a chance rescue after fish club auction.

[bekateen]

Hi All,

Last night my fish club, the Sacramento Aquarium Society, had their semi-annual mega auction. I sold a bunch of plecos and corys, and bought some new catfish too:

• 2 (M & F) speckled madtoms
  Noturus leptacanthus
  from Georgia
• 8 corys ID'd as
  Corydoras napoensis
  (but I haven't looked closely to confirm ID - to be sure, the males in the group do not look as nice as the lone male napoensis I had in the past)
• 4 large
  Baryancistrus beggini
  (to add to a group I've had for a little over a year now)

I also wanted to bid on a bag of four large plecos ID'd as

Lasiancistrus schomburgkii

. But the person who brought the bag had to pull it from auction just before bidding because for some reason the water had fouled and all the fish looked dead in the bag. After the auction, the owner of the bag noticed that one fish looked alive but weak, so he let me have the bag to try to rescue the fish. I had to change the water right then at the restaurant, but believe it or not, I was at a fish club meeting in a room full of 150 people, and no body had extra water in their car or a bottle of dechlorinator. I was forced to use chlorinated tap water and worse yet, it was cold (from a drinking dispensor - things couldn't have been worse if the fish were alive). Three hours later I got back home and unbagged the fish. I put them straight into a bucket with mild temp dechlor water. One fish was alive but weak. I performed a type of "mouth-to-mouth" resuscitation on the fish and two more fish them started twitching and making mouth movements. I thought might have saved them. I set them up in a tank with a filter and airstone and went to bed, but by then the two had stopped moving again (the last fish never showed any signs of life).

Today I checked and all three of those fish were dead - only one survivor. The ID was wrong on the fish, they turned out to be

Pseudolithoxus anthrax

, and they were big too. The three largest fish were 8.5-9cm SL, and the smaller fish was about 7.5-8 cm SL. The sole survivor was a big male. The dead included a big male, a big female, and I think a smaller male. While I'm glad I saved the one fish, I'm so sad that it seemed like I came close to saving the other two. Prior to the fish club auction, I didn't plan on buying them that day, but boy I'm sad I don't have them now.

Knowing their ID helps explain why they died in the water - Pseudolithoxus is not tolerant of low quality fouled water.

Maybe I'll get more to go with my lone male, assuming he gets stronger.

Cheers, Eric

[stuby]

Glad to hear you where able to save to one bud.... sad to hear they others didn't make it!

Take care and hope the lone survivor keeps doing well,
Chuck

[bekateen]

Thanks Chuck.

[MarcW]

Sorry to hear that Eric, good effort though, at least you could save one. Hopefully you'll find a girlfriend for him one day!

[bekateen]

Here's two more pics of the live fish from last night as I changed its water.

[Linus_Cello]

No dechlor at auction? Was there a rebagging station?

[bekateen]

Usually yes, but this night surprisingly no. And nobody seemed to know why there wasn't the rebagging station that night.

[bekateen]

Last night I received four more

Pseudolithoxus anthrax

from the same source as before. These are all big. The three largest are 10.5cm - 11.5cm SL and the fourth is about 9cm SL.

Looking at their body shape, I'd say they're all males (none are fat in the midbody), although the largest specimen has shorter pectoral odontodes, as does one other, relative to two with really long odontodes. So I'm hoping this one or two are females that need fattened up.

Sorry for the crummy photo. The was a lot of glare.