Where's my fish?

I got home this afternoon to find that one of my neon tetras is missing. Three months ago, I pulled the aquarium out of my parents' attic and got it up and running for the first time in years. Initially I got three zebra danios, a big mystery snail came a couple of weeks later, followed by three neon tetras. Near the end of September, one of the danios started acting all funny. It couldn't really move its tail and spent a lot of time sitting on the bottom. The one morning, I found it was skeletonized on the bottom.

Then last week, one of the tetras was acting the same way, limping on the bottom. One night when I went to turn off the light to go to bed, I saw that the snail was eating the gimpy fish alive! The fish was trying to get away, but the snail was wrasping away on its tail. When the snail let it up after a few minutes, the fish had no tailfins and no scales on the back half of its body. When I woke up the next morning, there was a skeleton.

This afternoon though, there was no fish and no skeleton either. Sad times in the aquarium. That one in the dentist's office in Finding Nemo made me think it was more friendly. Of course now that I think about it, they did try to escape. Maybe my tetra is just looking for his dad right now.