I scooped Ricky out of his tank. It’s so weird, being able to not only touch your fish (I didn’t touch his body, just his fins b/c originally i was gonna scoop him out with my hands, but I couldn’t bring myself to touch his body) but having him so lifeless and basically just bobbing around. His body is dense, I think due to the tumor, so he didn’t have the “float upside down” death that fish keepers commonly see and it kept sinking down the ground when ever I tried creating waves to “push” it into the jar.
Upon closer look, you can see that the tumor is a pale white and that his gills are stretched to the max. I think in the end he was struggling to get air.
I have some regrets... I think I could have moved him into a smaller tank and decreased the water levels so that it would be easier for him to get air. But I didn’t think he would need it considering how much he was swimming yesterday. His death surprised me. I honestly thought he would make a full recovery.
I won’t be flushing his body down the toilet since, in the case his death was caused by parasites or fungal/bacterial infection, I don’t wanna accidentally have that outbreak to ocean/river life.
Interesting that even in death, his expression is pretty typical. His grumpy face was the most typical.