Art book

Tribute to Ronny

Sorry I'm gonna talk about my pet fish dying in this chapter, so if that makes you uncomfortable you might wanna forgo reading this.

So yesterday there was a malfunction with a piece of equipment in my aquarium, and I lost one of my fish.

I had attached a large metal cylinder to my tank that had a UV light inside it, that was suppose to filter water. I did this because I've been having a big problem with algae in the water column.
I burrowed it second-hand, which was why this particular one was so large compared to the size of my tank.

I noticed after I hooked it all up that my two clowns were swimming unusually, and coming up to the surface a lot. So I tested the water for ammonia and nitrite, and both came up normal; so I ended up just chocking it up to me being paranoid.

Later on though I found my male clownfish lying on the sand breathing quickly, which is a very textbook sign of shock. My female joined soon after.

I immediately took the steriliser out, and I realised that what had happened was that when the water was going through the cylinder, it was getting cooled from the metal, which was dumping an immense amount of cold water into the tank.

Fish are very sensitive to changes in temperature, and their bodies won't coping with it.

I did a small water change wth some warm water to get the temperature back to normal, and then continued to check in on them every five minutes for the next couple of hours.

My female did start to recover, but my male, Ronny, became very weak and was just lying flat on the sand while hyperventilating. So I sort of took him into my hand and held him up to the surface so that he could breathe easier (there's always more oxygen at the top of the tank than the bottom).

I do think he appreciated this as whenever he fell off my hand he immediately swam back on it. But after about an hour of holding him like this he passed away from exhaustion.

My female clown, Jemima, has become very withdrawn today, because she always leaned on Ronny to be the more bold one out of the two. Ronny has an immense amount of personality, and it was devastating to have this happen.

So anyway I did a little drawing of him as a little tribute to him

I do already miss him very dearly. He had so much character that he was a bit unique amongst other clownfish. It's gonna be sad to have to replace him but Jemima won't be able to cope by herself. I don't think she's ever been alone before.

Here are some photos that I have of him from earlier on (Ronny is the smaller one)

Tbh most of my photos of Ronny are hella blurry because he swam with a sort of aggressive wiggle motion. We called it his wiggle dance.