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Well, that was unpleasant!

We have been tank cleaning this afternoon,
and I removed a large artificial rock/cave piece
so we could vacuum underneath it. I shook it
to dislodge stray cory cats, and set it on a table
on some paper towel while we cleaned.

After scraping the tank walls, vacuuming, changing
the filters, etc. I went to replace the rock . . .
and found my raphael cat lying on the table.

She is still alive, and woofling inside her favorite
hiding place back in the tank . . . but she must have been out
of water 15 minutes!

Any ideas on how long these cats can survive
out of water?

Kathy S

I don't know how long doradids can stay out of water, but some woodcats (which are closely related to doradids) can last for hours. I once had a couple of false jaguar cats (Liosomadoras morrowi) shipped to me that had punctured the bags with their spines. Most of the water was gone and they were barely alive with very weak gill movements (must have been that way for at least a few hours, as the box they came in was damp and no longer wet). They recovered after an hour in the tank.

When we moved house a couple of years ago we broke down all the tanks and a bagged all the various fish and placed all the bogwood into a large plastic sack. When we arrived at the new house i started to quickly reasemble the tanks on the living room floor so we could get the fish out of the bags and back into the tanks when i heard a faint croaking noise coming form the plastic sack, on a closer inspection i discovered a still living Agamyxis pectinifrons in the bottom of the bag. The fish must have wedged its self into a piece of the bogwod and had survived at least 2 hours out of water! When i returned the fish back to the tank it swam off as if nothing had happened and is still with us even now.