I have an aquaterra background in my 125 gallon thank, the tank is basically new since my four year old daughter decided to give my Arrowana 2 liters of Pepsi because "He was thirsty".
Everything is up, cycled, and great except for one little problem. The background along the bottom had a 1/2 inch bow in it leaving it high in the center, no biggy, just put in a cedar shim to tighten everything up while I was putting in one heck of a bead of silicone. Everything set up nice, got the sand in, rocks yada yada. But appearently forgot to fill the void left by the shim with sillicone.
Some time later I was sitting back looking at the 8 little cichlids swimming around, chasing each other, you know fish stuff, when it dawned on me that the tank sure looked vacant. So I proceeded to counting them..."1,2,3,4,5,6.....WTF? OK start again...1.2.3.4.5.6! Two of them are missing!!!"
My brain went into action mode! " Where could they have gone? The lids are closed, the kids haven't been here all day, and the cat is far too stupid to mastermind a coup like this!"
After doing my best to search behind the background, wich was almost impossible because the tank is about 2 inches from the wall, and the background is anywhere from almost flush with the back of the tank to about 3 inches inside the tank. I found them! Back there chillin'
Turns out the water pressure in the front of the background was higher than the backside, this caused the substrait to get sucked in behind the background, exposing the escape route for my little friends.
So the problem is how do I get 'em out? I can't get a net back there. I did try a lazer pointer to try and show them the way out, but it is far too restricted a space to pull that off. I also pulled off the overflow screen on the background, and pulled the fx5 output out of it's hole so there are now 3 ways to get out. Sometimes there is one back there, sometimes 3 and a catfish.
I'm out of ideas, and I really don't want to plug up the holes and call it a day, then deal with body recovery later.
So any Ideas? I've also included a pic of the setup so you can see kinda what I am talking about. Thanks for any help in advance! Jay