What do you do when a fish dies?

[JingleAllTheWay]

Weird question: What do you do when a fish dies?
Do you bury it under a tree?
Flush it down the toilet?
Throw it in the trash?

And what do you do to the tank after a fish dies? Do you completely empty it and start over (which would seem extreme)? Or can you just add a new fish?

[dukie1346]

I usually flush the fishy down to the magical world of the sewer.....lol

[dramaqueen]

They say not to flush them but I do, too. I wouldn't throw it in the trash and if I buried it in my yard (actually I don't own the area around my house), the cats would probably dig it up.

[Chicklet]

usually I flush them.

However cutting a long story short.....I took a dead male guppy the other day and put it in a small bowl with salt and it came back to life...
So after that experiment I will be placing all new guppies from Walmart in a high solution of salt water as soon as I get them home...then slowly acclimating them down to fresh clear water..

[dukie1346]

It actually came back to life? wow

[dramaqueen]

Dukie, I like your signature. :)

[Twistersmom]

My fish never die. I am just that good. (I wish that was true!)
I cry, then throw it in the trash. I wanted dissect the last one because I have had 3 clown loaches to die from the samething, but I could not do it.

[dramaqueen]

I had to throw a hamster in the trash when I was in college. I had no where to bury him. It broke my heart to do it but I had no other choice.

[MarcMayhem]

I usually just throw them in the toilet..
Heart broken every time =(

[Nataku]

If the fish was the only inhabitant of the tank, after it's death the tank usually gets a good scrubbing down unless I'm 100% sure that it simply died of old age and not some infection or disease. And since I'm a paranoid bat about that sort of thing, I pretty much always rule it as 'their immune system must have been weakened because of age, and that is how they caught something and it killed them' ...and so the tank gets cleaned.

If the fish wasn't the only one in the tank, it's still a partial water change immediately after removing the dead fish (fish bodies decaying in the water raise ammonia levels!) and a thorough inspection of the other fish in the tank to make sure they aren't coming down with anything.

Then it's time for new fish. =D