Jumper

[CanadianCowbell]

So bit of quick history, last week we lost one of our mollies to a jump out of the tank so I have been quite nuts about checking the other mollies to make sure we don't loose another one. Well when I went to feed them a couple of minutes ago I realized that we were missing a mollie.

We looked all inside the tank and then all around the stand when I decided I couldn't go through finding another dead fish so I left Aaron to searching. After another minute or so he called me to tell me that he found him/her sort of twitching on the floor. He quickly picked him/her up and put him/her back in the tank.

So the molly is swimming around and even ate some worms (today was frozen blood worm day for the dwarf puffers). Is there anything else we need to keep and eye out for or anything else we can do?

And on the matter of jumping, we are pretty sure the jumps out of the tank happen when our older female molly spazzes (usually when someone walks into the room or anywhere near the tank). What can we do to either calm this fish down (do they make fish atavan? lol)? Is there any way we can kind of make it so they can't jump out? What do other fish owners do?

[monkE]

I've had issues with a few jumpers too....i don't use any canopies on my tanks so i have to be careful what kind of fish I stock them with! I don't really have any useful advice other than make sure the top is covered so that if they do jump, they can't make it out... or swap out your mollies for something that doesn't jump.

[Elle]

I'd cover the tanks. If you like the look of open tanks, you can try what we did:

Djamm made cardboard templates of the top of my betta tanks (a Fluval Chi and a 3g mini bowfront). I took them to Glass Station in PoCo on the Mary Hill bypass and had them cut me custom acrylic lids to fit the template. Cheap, looks good, and the bettas don't jump! Because they're clear acrylic, you still have that "lidless" look to the tanks.

A side benefit to this is that there's a lot less heat loss and evaporation.

[CanadianCowbell]

I don't really know how to explain the hood setup. It has the plastic part with a plexiglass? section. Then there is the housing which has the light which goes over the plexiglass section but continues as far as the back. I don't see how we can completely close it off cause we use one of theo hang on back filters as well as one of those heaters that hang over the edge.

We did notice though that the heater had a crack in it and removed it (and moved in my fully submersible till we get a new heater). They are still a bit spazzy but we haven't had any jumpers (and we have put down some red fabric behind so if there are any jumpers we have a better chance of noticing them sooner.

I am currently thinking of making something using small sections of wood and some nylons to close off that back section. I will post pictures when I pick up some batteries for my camera so I can explain it better.