Well this isn't the story of the big one that got away, but it's still a heck of a fish story...

It starts this past Christmas, oh about 6 and half months ago. Summer and I went to Santa Barbara for a week or so, leaving our 10 pet goldfish with a few self feeding pellets and a wave goodby. On our return we were feeding the fish when Summer exclaims, "where's the big white one?!!" The big white one was the largest and most agressive goldfish in the tank. I mean he was probably pusing 3 inches long here people. We looked high, we looked low, we looked on the ground around the tank, he was absolutely nowhere to be found. Not one single scale, one piece of skeleton, one fin just to remember him by.

Time passes .... and

Yesterday, 6 and a half months later we started getting ready to clean the tank. We have these amazing little sucker fish that are really good algae eaters, so we pulled the tubes and layed them on the bottom for the sucker fish to eat the algae out. A few hours later we left to run some errands and when we came back Summer walks in the door and says, "Oh my God one of our fish turned white!!!" I'm like, "what the?!!?!?" And it hit me. The white fish we were looking at was our old white fish that had disappeared over Christmas 6 and a half months ago. He was completely emaciated. Like a brook trout at 11,000 feet, his head was huge and bony, and his body was distorted and wracked with hunger. But the darn fish was alive, and you know where he lived for all that time? He lived in a 3/4" space under the undergravel filter in total darkness. Living on a diet that could only have consisted of fish poop, that white goldfish spent somewhere in the neighborhood of 180 days, and yesterday the little sucker had the werewithal to point his nose towards freedom and swim out. Amazing!

We realized now that he had swam down the 1" tube about 15 inches, turned the corner and gotten stuck underneath. When we came back from Christmas we put the cap back on the tube and in between then and now he never once could poke his head up because of the air which gets pumped down into each tube. I guess you could say this was a "big one that got away story" after all.