In November of last year we decided to get some fish for our daughter's first birthday. I got one of these small 10 litre plastic tank kits and bought 2 goldfish and a Zebra Dano. They had one incident of Ick about 9 months ago but other than that have been happy & healthy. We'd only ever gone away for weekends since getting them and I'd always bought these small weekend feeder blocks which usually had a fair bit left of them over a week later, but they did eat off bits off it.
Well...we're just back from a 2 week holiday to USA and I bought a different block feeder, seashell shape which should feed a number of fish for 2 weeks, so I thought it would quite happily do my three small fish.
However...I came home to find (much to our horror!) one lonely fish (the largest of them all, a big orange gold fish), and NO sign at all of the smaller gold fish or the Zebra dano.
Can gold fish become canablistic and eat their friends? The block feeder still looks totally uneaten and has been in the tank for over 3 weeks now, so I wonder if it was faulty and they got hungry and the biggest survived on the smaller ones? Or....did the others just become ill and die and he ate them? I do wonder if they had insufficent oxygen, as my small filter/pump died the weekend before we left and the new one I bought didn't airate it at all.
Any ideas? There was NO sign at all of there ever having been other fish - not even bits and pieces of dead fish, so I'm totally mystified! Just didn't think such a thing could happen. I'd have thought I might at least come home to find floating fish, but not nothing at all. Very confused!