# No one told me multies can jump



## Kaxen (Mar 3, 2013)

Oh my gosh... I was removing the juvenile multies from my tank and I had like a hold out in one of the shells despite my best efforts to raise the shells near the surface of the tank and make them uncomfortable.

Finally got him out and while I tried to wrangle him into the net, he jumped like six inches into the air. ((okay, maybe a little less than that, but it felt like a lot!) 

Good thing the water level was low. 



Oh goodness.... I need to move these guys into PVC pipes or flower pots or something. Getting them out of their shells took forever and they breed recklessly when left to their own devices.


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## Mousie (Feb 16, 2015)

Unfortunately I found this out the hard way with my multies. I was walking into the dining room and saw a dead fish on the carpet.  Not long after that, I was cleaning my desk (the tank use to be on one of the sections of my desk in my office) and I have this round thing that holds pens, paperclips and numerous other office supplies. I turned it upside down to get all the dust and debris out and out plopped a dried up dead fish. I was horrified!

Now I try to keep the two filters and UV filter in the way of the top opening in the back to help prevent the little buggers from jumping out.


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## MikeG14 (May 31, 2014)

Kaxen said:


> Oh goodness.... I need to move these guys into PVC pipes or flower pots or something. Getting them out of their shells took forever and they breed recklessly when left to their own devices.


A not so LFS I visit from time to time uses ping pong balls with holes cut out of them just for reason. Granted it doesn't look that good, but you can't sell a fish if you can't get it out of the tank.


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## Kaxen (Mar 3, 2013)

Mousie said:


> Unfortunately I found this out the hard way with my multies. I was walking into the dining room and saw a dead fish on the carpet.  Not long after that, I was cleaning my desk (the tank use to be on one of the sections of my desk in my office) and I have this round thing that holds pens, paperclips and numerous other office supplies. I turned it upside down to get all the dust and debris out and out plopped a dried up dead fish. I was horrified!
> 
> Now I try to keep the two filters and UV filter in the way of the top opening in the back to help prevent the little buggers from jumping out.


Oh dear.  

I haven't had any problems with them jumping in normal conditions. So far mine just jump when they can't dive into a shell. 



MikeG14 said:


> A not so LFS I visit from time to time uses ping pong balls with holes cut out of them just for reason. Granted it doesn't look that good, but you can't sell a fish if you can't get it out of the tank.


I was also thinking about buying bamboo charcoal tubes. They at least look "natural" in the "not blatantly machine made" sense. Because I had a few leftover which the multies buried until I removed all the shells and then they were like "oooookkkkaaaayyyy this'll do" and dug them all up to use.


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## Mousie (Feb 16, 2015)

I saw this somewhere on a site when I was researching multies before I bought them. Hopefully you are familiar with eggcrate;

What they did was get some eggcrate and added some skinny (skinny skinny) PVC pipe to it and made it look like a table. They then put it down into the tank, put the shells on top of the eggcrate and put PVC pipe with end caps on one end down on the bottom of the tank. By nature multies will want to go down to the bottom of the tank, so they should leave their shells and swim into the pvc pipe where you can then snag them up. 

I've never tried this, but in theory it sounds like it would work.


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## Kaxen (Mar 3, 2013)

Hmmm yeah maybe eggcrate will help.

Using a plate maybe makes the fish go "I guess this is the floor now" because one of the dominant males was content calling it his new territory while the other one swam down like he was supposed to.


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