I had fish for the longest time growing up. These fish, I never fed them, I never cleaned the tank, and they were fine somehow.
(They ate some of the other fish, but whatever, that’s life.)
Some of them lived for damn ever. Three or four I’d had for at least seven years. One day, fed up with the filthy tank in my room, my mom gave me an ultimatum. Clean the tank in a week, or the fish are gone. I didn’t believe her threat, so I didn’t do it. I was a lazy, bad child. Then one day I came home to an empty tank in my room. My mom had gone through with the threat, flushing all of them.
I thought they were dead, but I can now take solace in the fact that maybe they’ve developed into a mutant species.
Because apparently flushing fish down the toilet doesn’t always kill them and, sometimes, they spawn and breed giant, mega-fish. Per the CBC:
The Alberta government is launching a campaign this summer to stop people from flushing their aquariums down their toilets.
Goldfish the size of dinner plates are multiplying like bunnies from Lethbridge to Fort McMurray, the province says.
“It’s quite surprise how large we’re finding them and the sheer number,” said Kate Wilson, aquatic invasive species coordinator at Alberta Environment and Parks.
In one case, the municipality of Wood Buffalo pulled 40 of the domestic fish species from a stormwater pond.
“That’s really scary because it means they’re reproducing in the wild, they are getting quite large and they are surviving the winters that far north,” said Wilson.
Yah you gotta kill your fish dead good now.
Even then that might not be enough.