Poor goldfish got a custom tiny wheelchair and no one can handle it

2025-04-28 09:59:41admin

Brace yourselves: your heart is about to be stolen by a goldfish.

Taylor Dean, a Youtuber that creates educational animal videos for nearly 300,000 subscribers, has a friend named Derek who works at a local aquarium - and just taught us all how to love by creating a tiny custom wheelchair for a goldfish in need.

And luckily, Dean shared it with the internet.

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The little fish suffers from swim bladder disease, a disorder that prevents goldfish from controlling their buoyancy in water. When the swim bladder is deformed or infected by bacteria or parasites, the goldfish loses its floatation stability - which could result in a fish floating to the top of the water, heavily leaning toward one side, or even swimming upside down.

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This particular goldfish, Derek said, had an incurable swim bladder problem that "prevented it from holding itself upright, and made it permanently stuck at the bottom of its tank."

“I got some airline tubing that people usually use in their tank and just placed it around the goldfish," Derek explained to BuzzFeed News, "I added some valves to the bottom of it, which acted as a ‘chair’ to prop him up."

"I added weights to the bottom of the ‘chair’ and something to keep him afloat on top (styrofoam), and slowly removed pieces until I achieved just the right buoyancy to make it easy for him to swim around without feeling like he’s dragging around a chair," he continued. "The bottom weight is almost equal to the pull on top so it works quite well for him!"