My tanks are in my bedroom, which is in the basement. About a month ago, after returning from a visit to my boyfriend's brother and sister-in-law for the weekend, I found what looked like a giant spider dead in the bottom of my tank. The water also looked awful so I knew my dad had not actually listened to me when I said that the fish would be perfectly fine unsupervised for the weekend and had dumped in a lot of food. I figured the spider had been attracted to the light, fallen in and drowned. It was a wolf spider and I know they are relatively harmless, but I freaked out and cleaned the ENTIRE basement anyway, just to be safe, and spent the next week getting my params back in order with PWCs.
Last week while I was outside doing some yard work, my dad said something about all the wolf spiders that have taken up residence in the rocks we have around all the flower beds and told me to catch them and feed them to my fish. I blinked a few times and asked him why in the world would I want to catch spiders for my fish when there is a ready supply of earthworms, especially since I have no idea if they could bite the fish or end up being poisonous. He replied that my fish (the African butterfly fish) had attacked and eaten the spider he had dropped into the tank when I wasn't home. I was horrified and told him that no, the fish had not eaten the spider since I had to fish it out when I got home and that it will 'attack' anything that gets dropped into the tank in front of it if it's hungry, whether or not it's food. I asked him why he was even doing anything with the fish since I have the lighting on timers and they can all live just fine for a weekend without being fed. We ended up having a conversation about how delicate of a balance an aquarium is with pH and the nitrogen cycle and everything and why it is not a good idea to add random things, or lots of food, to fish tanks.
