Phil,

Well, raccoons are fairly small, I'd say somewhere between an otter
and a skunk, but they can be really fat. And since our house's more in the
inland away from the coast, I doubt cormorants are responsible for this.

It seems that whatever did the damage was either very strong or worked
as a team. My dad had some wire mesh sort of hovering over the top,
but it was crooked that morning, and a couple of flower pots were broken,
too. And there were 20 fish in the tanks, some of them were really big,
and they were all eaten. We suspect maybe more than one raccoon was
involved.

Oh well, your suggestion is well taken. I'll pass it on to my folks
and see what they can do. But I guess they're probably already
experienced in this sort of things since this isn't the first time it
happened.

Thanks.

-Ed

On Tue, 27 Jan 2004, Phil L wrote:

Edward Hua wrote:
: Hi,
:
: My parents have two fishtanks too large to be placed inside the
: house, so they set them up in the backyard. In them they had some 20
: different fish, big and small, that they took care of everyday. But
: this morning when they went out to the yard, they found the fishtanks
: ransacked, with the fish gone, their body parts scattered on the
: ground. It appeared that some wild animal snuck in in the middle of
: the night, forced its way through the surrounding flower pots, took
: off the covering glass on top of the tanks, and had quite a feast.
: Since some of these fish my parents have had for three years,
: needless to say they were really heart-broken when they saw the
: massacre in the morning.

Large fishtanks would have to be covered with pretty large chunks of glass?
How big are raccoons? I'm from the UK and we dont have them here, our fish
are eaten by birds, mostly herons, but also cormorants.
I assumed raccoons were small ?
Anyway, if it was raccoons, then the best way would probably be to make the
lid of the tank from a timber frame covered with wire mesh about one inch
diameter, short of surrounding your entire garden wth wire mesh (which i
assume they could easily climb anyway) it would be wise to just have a lid
made of it through which you could feed the fish - it would only ever need
to be moved when major cleaning was done or the addition of new fish etc.
:
: This is not the first time it happened. In the past, there were a
: couple of incidents some wild animal (our guess is raccoons) came in
: at night, eating our fish, leaving a mess behind. Learning the lesson
: the hard way, my parents have put up added defense against such
: intrusions, short of killing the intruders with poision (frankly now
: I'm very tempted by that idea). But last night topped them all, with
: but one of the 20 fish barely alive.
:
: So my question is if anybody could suggest a way of preventing
: this from happening again. I know people here in New Jersey, bothered
: by deer entering their yard, put up electric fences. I wonder if
: there's anything like that for fishtanks as well. Also, since my
: parents live in the outskirts of Los Angeles (more inland area),
: their backyard facing the foot of the hill, does anybody have any
: idea what kind of animal could be doing all this damage? Is a raccoon
: capable of such things? Do they eat fish?
:

No idea, but we have otters in the UK which have been known to invade small
ponds etc.

: If you know of another newsgroup that more directly deals with
: this kind of questions, please let me know. Thanks in advance.
:
: -Ed