Terrible Advice Tuesdays: Scraping Your Tank’s Glass? Your Fish Are Doomed!
Terrible Advice Tuesdays: A slime coat enhancing product should be added before you scrape your tank’s glass. This will help prevent the fish from getting sick from the stress of the algae scraper or razor blade.
The rest of the story: I think an alien from outer space made this one up and passed it onto a human being during an alien abduction! Fish might get startled or scared from you scraping your tank’s glass. However, that doesn’t mean they’ll get sick from it, or that you need to add slime coat enhancing products just because you are scraping down your tank.
If your fish get scared, they’ll go hide until you are done scraping. Some of my fish follow the algae scraper around and eat whatever flies off!
Forget the slime coat enhancing product when you scrape the glass. Just scrape and move on with life!
Browse the Store! Questions?
I think people that made this one up is the company that makes this slime coat so you buy more slime coat
My yellow tang loves my scraper and often gets in the way of getting the job done! The others seem to follow suit now after realising there is no danger to them.
My Big Bad “aggressive” eel and trigger vanish at the sight of a hand and scraper, but as far as getting sick no way. I can put those guys inside a microwave an they’ll still be fit for duty.
Just ridiculous people actually think this stuff is even feasible!
My Foxface Rabbit Fish………who by the way is MAGNIFICENT, gets sooo stressed when I scrape, or for that matter when I do anything (like clean the outside, coral spot feeding). He turns black, his spines come out. But then he gets over it…………….so he must be a guy:)
I love taking the razor blade to my glass. My clowns try to eat my hand up. One time my female hit my hand so hard she bounced off and landed on the floor. She laid there looking up at me and you could almost see the “oh crap” expression on her face. I picked her up, put her back in the tank and for once she went back in the rocks and hid. Next time I scraped she was back at it again. Love my clowns.
@ Andrew. That’s funny. I have a spotted foxface in my tank. The biggest coward in my tank. He’s always hiding and swimming around as if being chased by predators. But it’s ironic because I don’t have any predators in my tank and he’s the most dangerous (toxic) fish in my tank but he’s the cowardly lion. LOL. thanks for that.
Hey Mark,
Where do you get all the terrible advice from or are you just making up fictitious stories to keep the site alive and running?
Thanks Chad. One time he jumped out, but landed on the egg crate panels I have over the tank. I grabbed him to put him back and accidently contacted his spines. Oweee!!!!!!!!! But that is just fine cause he is safe and sound……….the things we do for our kids.
Randy Weber…the advice comes from lots of places. This piece of advice was emailed to me as someone wanted to check it’s validity as they were given this advice by their local fish store.
Hey Randy,
Are you just kidding? Mark is as credible as they come!!!!!!!!!!
While we’re talking about scraping, does anyone have a good suggestion for effectively scraping calcified algae off of an acrylic aquarium? I was letting one of the side walls ‘grow in’ but everyone is telling me it looks terrible. I tried to take the stuff off using my usual acrylic scraper and pads, but it’s like tiny bits of cement and I can only do a few inches at a time before my arm is exhausted! If elbow grease is the only solution, I’ll keep at it…but if there is anything that can make this easier, love to hear it!
I’ve been in this hobby for 30 years and it makes me cringe and lmao at the same time to say that this kind of BS has been going all this time.