Goldie – an apology

A few of you (well 36 of you) may have read my last post that reported the demise of Goldie, the goldfish. A friend pointed out that the fish may not have been dead (dead goldfish sink not float) and that I should leave it for a couple of days to see if it recovered.

I therefore typed into my search engine of choice “goldfish floating on its side dead” and was disturbed to see the below article at the top of the list.

http://hubpages.com/hub/STOP-Your-Pet-Fish-May-Not-Be-Dead

Apparently, fish can overeat and their swimming bladder can break down. This can cause them to float to the surface and appear to be dead. The site says you should leave them for 4-5 days just in case and then feed them peas.

Goldie – in my defence, you certainly looked dead. I wiggled you around a bit and you didn’t move (at all). To paraphrase Monty Python, you didn’t look as if you were resting, stunned or pining for the fjords. You looked for all the world as though you had passed on, were no more, had ceased to be, had expired and gone to meet the Koi Carp in the sky. You were a stiff, bereft of life, resting in peace, pushing up the daisies! Your metabolic processes were now ‘istory; you were off your novelty castle; you had kicked the bucket had shuffled off your mortal coil and swam past the filter to join the bleedin’ choir invisible In short, I believed you were an ex-goldfish. I may have been wrong.

I did suggest to the family that we retrieve you from the compost bin (no traditional funeral for you – o/a septic tank). We agreed that this would be the equivalent of closing the aquarium lid after the goldfish had floated.