# Disaster and lesson learned



## cammywf (Jan 9, 2015)

What a day!!!!!!

My five year old boy and his friends decided to feed my fish and shrimp when I was at work today. They dumped half bottle of blood worm, half bottle of brine shrimp, half bag of flakes, and half bottle of gold fish pallets and shrimp pallets. When I got home I cannot even see the substrate and water surface. All covered by fish food. /cry /cry

It's a heavy planted tank, and it's too hard to vacuum everything out, so I ended up with pull out all the plants and try my best to take hundreds of shrimps out. It's lucky they didn't decide to fertilize my plants, or I will have a tank full of dead fish and shrimps.

Now lesson learned, never leave fish food and fertilize at the place where kids can reach, it might lead to a disaster.

I am redoing my tank now. what a Christmas surprise.


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## Jcmalouie (Apr 2, 2015)

Sorry to hear. Yeah I have childproof locks on my doors


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## SeaHorse_Fanatic (Apr 22, 2010)

From the time they can walk and talk, my kids have learned to always ask Daddy if they can do anything to the tanks, whether its feeding, catching a fish or adding a plant. Now if only I can get them to teach my wife this lesson. Irene has dumped a half "stick" of cyclopeeze (when I use it a tiny sliver at a time), stuck some left over PANCAKE in the tank, and done other stuff that leaves me scratching my head. At least your son & his friends have the excuse of being 5 years old and not knowing any better.

Good luck with the cleanup and re-start.

Anthony


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## The Guy (Nov 26, 2010)

SeaHorse_Fanatic said:


> From the time they can walk and talk, my kids have learned to always ask Daddy if they can do anything to the tanks, whether its feeding, catching a fish or adding a plant. Now if only I can get them to teach my wife this lesson. Irene has dumped a half "stick" of cyclopeeze (when I use it a tiny sliver at a time), stuck some left over PANCAKE in the tank, and done other stuff that leaves me scratching my head. At least your son & his friends have the excuse of being 5 years old and not knowing any better.
> 
> Good luck with the cleanup and re-start.
> 
> Anthony


 "Pancakes"  Hope your cleanup goes well.


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## Gaia (Jun 20, 2016)

Sorry to hear about your tank. I can only imagine what it looks like. My friends son did the same thing. 

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## Gaia (Jun 20, 2016)

SeaHorse_Fanatic said:


> From the time they can walk and talk, my kids have learned to always ask Daddy if they can do anything to the tanks, whether its feeding, catching a fish or adding a plant. Now if only I can get them to teach my wife this lesson. Irene has dumped a half "stick" of cyclopeeze (when I use it a tiny sliver at a time), stuck some left over PANCAKE in the tank, and done other stuff that leaves me scratching my head. At least your son & his friends have the excuse of being 5 years old and not knowing any better.
> 
> Good luck with the cleanup and re-start.
> 
> Anthony


Thank you for the laugh this morning Anthony!

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## CRS Fan (Apr 21, 2010)

That's interesting...... my son decided to feed my Eheim Aquastyle tank with fish food yesterday! I had to basically dismantle half the tank, move some plants to other tanks, and do 2 75% water changes to fix the problem. Luckily, I moved the shrimp a couple weeks ago. He is now aware that he must ask daddy before feeding.

Warm regards,

Stuart


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## onefishtwofish (Apr 21, 2010)

what was Irene thinking indeed. Pancakes r no good without syrup and whip creme.


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## Haven (Dec 26, 2012)

Same thing happened to me, a friend's 6 year old got hold of my fish food. Entire container of NLS pellets in a 55 gallon. it looked like soup, lost half of my inhabitants. i now keep the food high enough so the little ones don't get over zealous.


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## SeaHorse_Fanatic (Apr 22, 2010)

Irene's cousin once house sat for us. Since he'd done it before, he was overconfident and wouldn't listen to instructions. Idjut dump over half a XLG jar of large pellets into the 110g barebottom angelfish tank, even though I wrote a note & specifically told him no pellets for the angels. Didn't notice until after I paid him that my barebottom was now covered with enough uneaten pellets to look like it had a gravel bottom. Always so much fun to do a 100% 110g water change right after you come back from a 4 days trip, before even unloading the CRV. Grrrrrr.

Now my mom looks after my tanks when we're gone for more than 3 days. She's so proud (and rightfully so) that's I've never lost a fish or coral while the tanks were under her care.

Anthony


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## SeaHorse_Fanatic (Apr 22, 2010)

So we had a playdate with a "naughty" boy from Sunday School class and after being told 5 or 6 times NOT to feed the fish, he dumped $20 worth of floating fish pellets, sinking pellets, FD tubifex worms, FD shrimp & 30+ algae wafers into my riparium tank. Good thing Bella told me what happened (turned my back on the kid for under 5 minutes while talking to my friend about anemones) or he would have killed the entire tank. Ended up missing church to clean up the mess. There was enough food to cover an entire 30" x 30" surface area with floating fish food and after 15 minutes of netting everything out, it filled the bottom of one of my buckets completely. Told Irene to get the kid out and he's never allowed into our home again in the future. Grrrrr.

It was obvious he was just doing this to be nasty and not to feed the fish cause he was even grabbing big containers of pellets from my other tanks to dump in.

Anthony


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## Haven (Dec 26, 2012)

SeaHorse_Fanatic said:


> So we had a playdate with a "naughty" boy from Sunday School class and after being told 5 or 6 times NOT to feed the fish, he dumped $20 worth of floating fish pellets, sinking pellets, FD tubifex worms, FD shrimp & 30+ algae wafers into my riparium tank. Good thing Bella told me what happened (turned my back on the kid for under 5 minutes while talking to my friend about anemones) or he would have killed the entire tank. Ended up missing church to clean up the mess. There was enough food to cover an entire 30" x 30" surface area with floating fish food and after 15 minutes of netting everything out, it filled the bottom of one of my buckets completely. Told Irene to get the kid out and he's never allowed into our home again in the future. Grrrrr.
> 
> It was obvious he was just doing this to be nasty and not to feed the fish cause he was even grabbing big containers of pellets from my other tanks to dump in.
> 
> Anthony


wow, what a mess. Hope everything survived.


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## SeaHorse_Fanatic (Apr 22, 2010)

Lost some baby kribs in the mess but everything else miraculously survived.

Saving grace is my love for overfiltration. I had just set up 2 sponge filters and an internal filter to supplement the 2 Eheim canister filters so having 5 filters for 70g of water in my 93g cube turned out to be a lifesaver.

Note to self: when a kid seriously, chronically misbehaves in SUNDAY SCHOOL, do NOT bring him over to your own home for any reason. Also, listen to my daughters when they warn about how bad a kid behaves in the future.


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## Haven (Dec 26, 2012)

SeaHorse_Fanatic said:


> Lost some baby kribs in the mess but everything else miraculously survived.
> 
> Saving grace is my love for overfiltration. I had just set up 2 sponge filters and an internal filter to supplement the 2 Eheim canister filters so having 5 filters for 70g of water in my 93g cube turned out to be a lifesaver.
> 
> Note to self: when a kid seriously, chronically misbehaves in SUNDAY SCHOOL, do NOT bring him over to your own home for any reason. Also, listen to my daughters when they warn about how bad a kid behaves in the future.


Well God works in mysterious ways lol


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## Gaia (Jun 20, 2016)

SeaHorse_Fanatic said:


> So we had a playdate with a "naughty" boy from Sunday School class and after being told 5 or 6 times NOT to feed the fish, he dumped $20 worth of floating fish pellets, sinking pellets, FD tubifex worms, FD shrimp & 30+ algae wafers into my riparium tank. Good thing Bella told me what happened (turned my back on the kid for under 5 minutes while talking to my friend about anemones) or he would have killed the entire tank. Ended up missing church to clean up the mess. There was enough food to cover an entire 30" x 30" surface area with floating fish food and after 15 minutes of netting everything out, it filled the bottom of one of my buckets completely. Told Irene to get the kid out and he's never allowed into our home again in the future. Grrrrr.
> 
> It was obvious he was just doing this to be nasty and not to feed the fish cause he was even grabbing big containers of pellets from my other tanks to dump in.
> 
> Anthony


Yikes!

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