Did we do something wrong? My son has had his first Beta, Nerp the Derp, for around three weeks. He was doing so goo and taking care of it. We changed around 30% of the water out and the next day we noticed it was really dirt and stinky. Couldn't find Nerp anywhere. We gave it another day in case it was hiding. Still no Nerp. I thought maybe it jumped out and the dog ate it? I decided to clean out the tank. When cleaning the filter, I saw the remains of Nerp. Unfortunately, I have no pictures of the little guy prior. I am guessing it was chasing a food flake and got sacked up? Is there anyway to keep this from happened again? Can we put something over the intake to keep them from getting sucked up? We have a little aquarium and if we can give another fish a good home, we would like to do so. Attached are photos of the filter and what type of tank it is.
https://www.reddit.com/gallery/1olux5e
Posted by Pamikillsbugs234
4 Comments
It should say sucked up, dumb autocorrect.
You’re 100% supposed to have a brace (should have come with the filter?) covering the intake, yes. If the bars on the brace are too far apart and still look like any part of the fish at all can get sucked in, you need to put a sponge over it.
another commenter is right, your filter looks like it’s missing a piece – your photo of the box is not very well lit but it doesn’t look like you have the filter input cover but that is cylindrical shaped and black, sticking out down into the water. if i were you i’d go back to the store you bought it from and see if you can get an exchange – that piece will fix your problem. sorry about your fish! 🙁
also for future tank cycling, (you mentioned the charcoal filter media that came with it) keep in mind charcoal filter media is a chemical filter mostly meant to pull things like medications out of the water. to my understanding people really only use it as needed. what i like to use in my filter is some type of bonded pad media you can cut to size for mechanical filtration of debris (also offers some biological filtration), and i also like to use ceramic filter media to house beneficial bacteria as another biological filtration medium.
https://preview.redd.it/wv4yzfrovoyf1.jpeg?width=920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=429e7c44011a6f9e019da7e7e5f119370b01dffb
Switch over to a sponge filter, there’s exactly 0% chance of that happening with one