Goldfish Needs Help Swimming, gets Tiny Custom Wheelchair

Today we learned about a goldfish that needed help and was saved in the cutest way possible: with a tiny aquatic “wheelchair”. Taylor Dean, an animal lover and educator on YouTube, has a friend named Derek that works at a local aquarium shop who shared his good deed for the day with her.

Derek told Taylor that a customer brought in their pet goldfish, saying that the fish couldn’t swim properly or stay upright. This lead to it being sadly stuck to the bottom of the tank all the time. Derek recognized this as swim bladder disease, which can affect a goldfish’s ability to control their buoyancy underwater. First Derek tried changing the goldfish’s diet and treated its water with no results. Lucky for this fishy that Derek is creative as he is kind, who then invented a custom flotation device that acts like a wheelchair

Using a piece of Styrofoam at the top and a tube brace with tiny weights, the fish can now swim freely! By removing bits of the Styrofoam and adjusting the tube weights, he was able to achieve the perfect balance and buoyancy. He was then even able to upgrade the wheelchair to a newer model!

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