Many of us love animals and we do what we can to make sure that the animals who live in our home are comfortable, happy and healthy. For most of us, those animals are a cat or a dog but for the person in this article, it was a goldfish. In fact, this little fish is about to steal your heart and for a very good reason.
You may not have heard of Taylor Dean before, but he makes YouTube videos for animal education and has almost 300,000 subscribers. His friend Derek works at a local aquarium, and we just got introduced to a little bit of goldfish love that comes in a most unexpected form. Fortunately, Dean had the forethought to share it with all of us online.
My friend made a wheelchair for a goldfish pic.twitter.com/QghXTY7rme
— Taylor Nicole Dean (@taylorndean) March 10, 2017
The fish suffers from a condition known as swim bladder disease. It keeps goldfish from controlling their buoyancy in water. The bladder is deformed or infected and the goldfish loses its flotation stability. This could cause the fish to float on top of the water or lean toward one side. In some cases, they may even swim upside down.
This fish have an incurable swim bladder problem that “prevented it from holding itself upright, and made it permanently stuck at the bottom of its tank.”
“I got some airline tubing that people usually use in their tank and just placed it around the goldfish,” Derek said, “I added some valves to the bottom of it, which acted as a ‘chair’ to prop him up.”
“I added weights to the bottom of the ‘chair’ and something to keep him afloat on top (styrofoam), and slowly removed pieces until I achieved just the right buoyancy to make it easy for him to swim around without feeling like he’s dragging around a chair,” he continued. “The bottom weight is almost equal to the pull on top so it works quite well for him!”
Wheelchair fish is doing well pic.twitter.com/eHTeoEBU58
— Taylor Nicole Dean (@taylorndean) March 14, 2017
H/T: Mashable
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