This blenny was pretty big; definitely didn’t make it out through the mesh. Still to this day not sure what to do differently. I could re-build the screen to take up a little more of the room but eventually I’ll probably add a skimmer and maybe a second auto feeder with nori pellets so it’s hard to plan for changes. It makes sense that fish might follow the glass up and take advantage of any gap, but I feel like I can only do so much. He landed several feet in front of the tank but I’m guessing he got out the back and landed on the top then flopped off the front. Just losing a fish is one thing, but when you do a full quarantine process with copper treatment each and every fish represents a significant time and money investment.
All I can think of is that maybe he was around the gyre pump and got startled when it turned on. Previously it ran at some level 24/7 but now that I’ve added some soft corals I realized the flow was just too much. So I reduced the flow so it now has a random pattern including being off, that’s the only recent change to the tank. I went ahead and added the mesh covers so hopefully that’ll prevent anything from getting snagged; my cleaner shrimp gave me some scares around the pump as well.
