this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2025
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[–] ada@piefed.blahaj.zone 32 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (4 children)

This is the story of Dave the fish. We were a group of young students, all around 18 or so.

Dave... My housemate bought a bunch of fish for the house. Cichlids, zebra fish etc. And we also ended up Dave. The pet shop guy threw him in for free, because he didn't know what type of fish he was. He was a small, generic silver fish, about the size of a zebrafish, but without their colouring.

Anyway, within a day or two of getting the fish tank set up at the house, Dave jumped out of the tank and landed on the floor! He laid on the floor for so long he was partially stiff by the time we found him.

We put him back in the tank, and he sank straight to the bottom without moving. We were looking for the net to get him out of the tank again when his gills started to move. He didn't move, but he was breathing, so we left him there.

The next day, he was fine, and you wouldn't have known anything had happened.

Within a year or so, every other fish in that tank died, but not Dave. So when we moved house, someone put him in a glass spaghetti container, with a sealed lid (something like this ) to make it easy to transport him.

When we got there, we put his (sealed) spaghetti container on a shelf, whilst we got the new house sorted out. And we then kinda forget he was there... Months later, while we were moving things around, we discovered this spaghetti container. It was still sealed closed, and so lined with algae, we couldn't see anything inside the container. And we remembered that was the container we used for Dave, so we opened it up, to clean out whatever remained of Dave.

Except Dave was still alive. Still doing fine. Despite being sealed in a spaghetti jar for months, untouched, unfed, with no water replacement.

By this point, we had started to realise that Dave was unkillable. But his troubles don't end there.... Because our lease on the house ended, and it was time to move again. But this time, we all went our own way, and some of us to another city. But when we talked later, none of us had Dave. He didn't make it to any of the new places we were all living.

I like to imagine that all these years later, he's still living quite happily in his spaghetti jar, planning on outliving us all...

[–] dumptruck@lemmings.world 1 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Wow, that's some impressive fish survival skills! I can only imagine how Dave ended up in such a precarious situation. It's amazing he managed to survive all those months with no water and no food. He must have been quite resourceful.

[–] ada@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago)

He had plenty of water! Because the container was sealed, it didn't evaporate off. It just didn't get replaced, or oxygenated... And I assume he quite happily munched away on the algae for food

[–] SGGeorwell@lemmy.world 13 points 1 day ago (1 children)

A charming story of fish neglect. Horrifying from Dave’s perspective.

[–] ada@piefed.blahaj.zone 5 points 1 day ago

Yep. In all seriousness, I've never owned fish since then, precisely because of what happened with Dave

[–] gigastasio@sh.itjust.works 11 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Clearly Dave died, passed into the afterlife, lost a game of chance to a demon and was forced into a deal for his soul, and ended up cursed with immortality.

[–] roofuskit@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago

Fuck that, Dave clearly sold the other fishes souls for immortality only to be stuck with a bunch of self centered kids. That's some monkey paw level wish fulfillment there.

[–] Postmortal_Pop@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago

He died the first time, he just didn't realize it and kept swimming along

[–] neidu3@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 day ago

Those first four words caused me to mentally rap this to the Fresh Prince theme.