Friday, I was there feeding them and noticed that — we got a new fish probably three or four weeks ago — I noticed that I couldn’t find that fish. Like he, he was really good at blending in, really good at hiding. Um, you know, there were often times when we would struggle to see him and then have to really look around and then it was like, “Oh yeah, there he is.” Well, I looked and looked and looked and could not find this fish.
It was a, a dwarf hawkfish. So kind of like, pinky-white striped, kind of, um, nice. You know, people, people were excited that we’d gotten a new fish and they thought he was kind of cool looking. He was kind of spiky on the top. And, um, so, I had a couple of other staff members come over and look for him to see if I just was, was not seeing something. And then, of course, there were a few patrons that heard us talking about trying to find him, so they were looking everywhere for him. Nobody could find him.
So I called the company and I said, “You know, I — maybe he’s just hiding or I don’t know how long you wait before you worry like, that something happened or, you know, that — whatever. Like we, we just can’t find him.” She said, “Oh, you know, he’s probably just hiding. I was just there yesterday. Like, he seemed fine, you know, call us tomorrow if you still can’t find him.”
So I left a note and my colleague, who was working on Saturday, called and — ‘cause she still couldn’t find him — they said, “Okay. Do you see any remains anywhere? Like can you see any, any bones or, you know, anything that would indicate that he’s maybe no longer with us or anything?” Um, and she said, “No, like we don’t see anything.” And the, and the, um, the fish people said, “Okay, you know, if we’re in the area, we’ll stop by, but, you know, there’s still a really good chance that he’s just, he’s just hiding and you know, he’ll, he’ll be — you’ll, you’ll see him come out, you know, at some point.”
Well, it got to be Tuesday, they — and they never came out. Like, they must not have been in the area or too busy or whatever. So it got to be Tuesday and we still had not seen him, you know, it had been the whole weekend, you know, it had been since, since, since Friday. So, didn’t see him. And we have a big puffer fish that is in the tank and he, um, uh, was pooping a lot. Which I know, sorry, this is kind of a gross story, but he was really pooping a lot. And, and it was sort of like it wasn’t passing like all the way out — off of his body. So it was kind of like hanging from his body. And the other fish were like poking at it because they like to eat it. And, you know, just, again, just really kind of gross like nature things, right?
So we called back and said, “This is what’s happening.” They wanted us to send a video so they could see what it was and they were like, “Yeah, that looks like what’s happening. And that probably means that he ate the other fish.” So they said, “It’s” — I mean and they said, “It’s still kind of possible that, you know, maybe he’s still around in there somewhere, but most likely, you know, as we’ve never seen this puffer fish, you know, have this sort of, this sort of thing happen to him before.” So they basically said like, this is probably him passing this, you know, this fish that he ate. So, they did apparently come today. I was not, um, I was not there when they came, but the guy looked around and really thinks that that is what happened.