Saving Spice the Goldfish!
and
Illustrated by her children with Digital Services by her husband
Spice was a small goldfish, about an inch long to be exact. He lived in a fish tank with several other goldfish. However he stood out as a very industrious little fish, as he would spend much of his day foraging, swimming about, picking up rocks into his mouth and then methodically scraping the muck off the rocks, which apparently was a great snack for him.
The other fish would just wait patiently for the daily feeding which typically took place right when I arrived at work in the morning. Oh yeah, I failed to mention that this little fish tank sat on my desk at my Women in Community Service office in downtown Ventura. I shared this wonderful office with our Area Director, Elizabeth Young. One day while I was working, I looked up at the tank and noticed that Spice was sitting very still at the bottom of the tank- not his typical active and productive self. I thought that maybe all of his hard work had finally caught up with him and that he was finally relaxing and enjoying being a goldfish. After a couple of minutes, he still laid at the bottom of the tank and I noticed that his gills were moving at a very slow pace, if at all. I got up to my feet and put my face as close to the tank as possible and realized that Spice's mouth was slightly open. I looked closely and realized that a small rock was stuck in his mouth! What probably happened was that the rock was small enough to force into his mouth, but too big to then open his mouth even wider to take it out! Because of this, Spice's mouth was doomed to stay in one position, which affected his ability to breath!
I felt completely helpless and called out to my boss, Elizabeth. She came into my office and I quickly gave her the doomed scenario. She stood there in silence looking at the fish. Suddenly she leapt into action... she asked for a paperclip that she immediately fashioned into a small hook. She held the hook in one hand and plunged her other hand into the fish tank... she grabbed Spice, pulled him out of the water and then proceeded to carefully insert the "hook" into his mouth, with the hopes of assisting in pulling out the relatively large rock out of his mouth. She had to do this quickly, as he was out of the water during this attempted extraction. After about 30 seconds, she put Spice back into the tank so that he could breathe again. She repeated this process approximately 3 times, until she was successful in extracting the little pebble that was firmly lodged in his mouth. As soon as she got the rock out, she put him back in the tank. He swam around happily and excitedly. In a matter of minutes, he was foraging for pebbles again! Needless to say, I changed the rocks at the bottom of the tank to larger rocks so that he could not at all fit them in his mouth. Spice went on to live for close to 4 years; growing about 50 times bigger; requiring a 90 gallon tank to live in.
Had it not been for Elizabeth's quick thinking, compassion for all creatures and tenacity... Spice would never have had the chance to grow into the wonderful large fish he ended up being!
M
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2 Comments:
An excellent website. Keep up the great work.
With Respect,
arfarf
Great blog!
Learned something new, Thanks!
marina
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