Did my fish commit suicide?

Factual Questions
1

My wife was quite shocked this morning when she discovered that her Beta fish was missing!!

The little fishie lived in a jar sized bowl on a shelf about 18" above the toilet, of which the toilet bowl is about 6 inches from the wall. We put it there to keep it away from the cats (the fish, not the toilet, silly!), and keep in mind that the cats get locked downstairs every night.

My theory is that the little feller suddenly thought he was the Birdman-ER FISHman of Alcatrazz, jumped out of the bowl, hit the back of the toilet, and slipped to his doom in the city sewage system. This is kind of gross, but we even sent our three cats into the bathroom on a search and find mission to make sure that there wasn’t a breakfast for them behind the toilet on the floor on in the wastebasket.

If the cats somehow got to the fish last night, which is impossible unless they are apparitions, the bowl would have been knocked over.

There’s a few things that bother me about the mysterious disappearence of the Lindbergh fish:

  1. Why would Lindy jump out? I mean . . we gave him EVERYTHING money could buy! We tried to be good parents!

We’ve had the little bastard for 8 months, and it’s just been this calm little fishy, just swimming around in it’s bowl. My wife said she overfed the little guy two nights ago, and that his bowl was very dirty. But the bowl has been dirty before.

What the hell did she feed him? STEROIDS?

  1. There is NO water around the fishbowl. If a fish jumps out of a bowl, wouldn’t you think there would be water on the shelf? And all over the toilet? We keep the water level high, which would make the likelihood of a mess all the more likely. And yes, I admit, easier for Flipper to jump out.

  2. It is a concave fishbowl. In other words, the top is of a smaller radius than the middle of the bowl. Or is the term convex? I digreee. Wouldn’t that make it HARDER to jump out?

  3. My wife and I usually keep the toilet seat and lid CLOSED!!

As you can imagine, I am very disturbed by this. Was the little fishy going through a suicidal episode? Did he . . DISINTEGRATE??? Was he abducted by aliens? Do my cats have mystical powers that allow them to walk through walls and doors?

Is this the Vince Foster of fish??!!??

Or worse yet . . . IS THERE A SMALL FISH HIDING UNDER MY BED WITH A KNIFE???

2

Three weeks from now, your fish will show up on your doorstep appearing to be woozy and slightly intoxicated. He will claim that he was abducted by aliens and that he was sexually abused and experimented upon.

Upon further investigation, you will discover that your fish was really hanging out in the neighborhood sushi bar the whole time.

At this point, you should have at least two questions:

  1. How does my fish know how to walk around and talk?
  2. Why would my fish be hanging around a sushi bar? Is he a cannibal?

Unfortunately, I cannot give you the answers to any of those questions without exposing the illuminati organization that controls the world (and consequently, your fishbowl.) The truth is out there.

3

But seriously…

Fish will attempt to jump out of a tank (or bowl) in which the water is really dirty. I don’t think it counts as “suicide”, more a desperate ploy for survival.

When a fish jumps out, it can really flip farther than you think, cover some serious distance. And no, there wouldn’t necessarily be water on the shelf.

Fish have an excellent sense of where the water’s surface is. It doesn’t matter whether the bowl is convex or square or whatever.

You’re sure he didn’t fall into the stool and get flushed absent-mindedly in the middle of the night? Maybe slid under some toilet paper that was already in there, so whoever flushed didn’t notice. That would be my first guess.

My next guess is that he jumped out and was consumed by a cat before you noticed he was missing.

My next guess is that he jumped out and is still somewhere on the bathroom floor, maybe under the rug or in-between the pages of a magazine. A fish seems to shrink up when it’s dead. I think it’s because of water loss. I’ve found a couple of dried-up dead fish on the floor in my day. So he’ll be smaller than you remember, and could have fallen somewhere that you won’t find him until the next time someone decides to replace the linoleum.

And no, I don’t think he’s hiding under your bed with a knife. In my experience, bettas are very up-front fish. If one of them is coming after you, you’ll know about it right away.

However, I do think you need to take a closer look at one of those cats (not mentioning any names, but a little bird told me…)

4

I had a beta fish once that lived for around two years, til my cat got to it. well that’s the theory anyway. I found the fish on the floor one day and the cat had been tring to get at it for months. it is possible for the fish to have jumped out and not leave much water, plus the water might have evaporated off the shelf.

I had a saltwater eel once that LOVED to get out of the tank, you’d think that it would have learned the first time that it couldn’t breath but it kept trying. then it got out one night and must have been killed by the cat cause it had some holes in it. strange thing is that it was 20 feet away from the tank with only a couple of holes and no rips, guess it was trying to wake us up to put it back.

but you know there might be a fish under the bed. crafty little bastards that they are and all. might have to get a fish trap.

5

This thread reminded me of a brilliant Red Meat comic:

Warning: Red Meat is not for the humorless and easily disturbed.

6

I once had a silver dollar fish who ate all of the other fish in the bowl, then when he was the only one left, he jumped out to his death one night.
Since his entire goal in life appeared to be eating other fish, and his work was done, it does appear that he turned to suicide to end his worthlessness.

7

Your problem is that you have a Beta fish, which is still pretty buggy, including the “Tank to Toilet Leap” error that’s pretty well documented. This is planned to be be addressed in the final release version. In the meantime, you might want to try reinstalling a Beta fish into your tank and then applying this patch, preferably over the top of the tank.

8

. . . hence the confusion.

Almost any fish will attempt a leap from time to time; sometimes seemingly randomly. Bettas (at least the male of the species kept in little bowls in the U.S., Betta splendens) are pretty weak jumpers compared to most other fish: their flowing fins are not conducive to athletic prodigality. Additionally, 9 times out of 10 a fish will jump at an angle, rather than straight up, so if you keep the water level low they’ll hit the side and end up back in the water.

As little physical agility as Bettas have, they have even less intellectual agility, and have no vague concept that to jump would mean their death. They have no inkling that the wall of their enclosure does not merely separate them from more water. Ther’re more likely to “think” of the wall the the bowl/tank as simply an obstacle in a larger body of water and not the only thing between them and raisinhood. So breaching this obstacle may seem like a good idea at the time.

As far as water quality being a factor, that’s less likely to be so with Bettas (and there family, the Anabantidae) than with most other fish. The reason they developed the ability to breathe air rather than metabolize the oxygen in the water is that they evolved in warm–hence oxygen deficient–isolated, small bodies of water. Some members of the family have been know to live for several generations in flooded water buffalo hoofprints. This of course makes them ideal for abuse at they hands of us humans, except that most people don’t keep them warm enough. In any case, declining water quality is more likely to cause an infection than a defection.

I’d assume it was a random leap–testing the waters, as it were–that went awry, and a lucky cat.

9

I had a betta named fido that would go to the top of his tank when my husband was near and hubby would pet the top of his head. Even though we took turns feeding it, it would ignore me.

Bettas can live in shallow pools of water because they can get oxygen from the air as well as the water. Flopping into a nearby pool is probably a survival technique. The can survive the journy across short tracts of dry land better than most other fish and that way as the pools evaporate they are not left high and dry and helpless.

10

Though this is true for some fish, it is not in fact the case for Bettas. Lungfish (three genera: South American Lepidosiren, African Protopterus, and Australian Neoceratodus), polypterids, and a few species of catfish are known to “travel” between bodies of water and have each developed certain adaptations to help them survive outside of water. Bettas, however, have only adapted the ability to breathe air from the surface of the water while remaining entirely submerged; not the ability to leave the water. Their skin and scales, for example, including the layer of slime that acts as a barrier to bacteria etc., are much more similar to the “standard” fish outsides than to the external adaptations of the above-mentioned walkers.

11

My aunt had a Betta that died by jumping out of its jar.

12

Which is why i said flop and not walk and better than most and not all fish.

13

I have had several male bettas jump. I was told by the fish store guy that in their native Thailand they live in the impressions from water buffalo hooves, in swampy areas, like rice paddies. Thus they need a smaller area in captivity than most other fish. They jump, in the wild, from footprint to footprint, and if they miss, they are still in a wet, swampy area. Always cover your betta bowl with something, I used netting.

14

Bettas are known for thriving in what I would consider to be stagnant water but I never heard of them migrating. Makes sense, though.

Maybe your betta wasn’t getting what he needed at home and decided to roam. It happens.

15

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16

Was he kind of a loner, keeping to himself most of the time? Did he ever express any desire to harm himself or others? Is there anyone, besides the cat, you can think of who would want the little guy dead? Was there a suicide note?

So many unanswered questions!

17

Had he been blowing a lot of bubbles lately?