Jason wrote regarding 'Re: [OT] Water pump ideas' on Thu, Mar 02 at 16:53:
> Do you know where you heard that alcohol kills fish in small quantities?

I recently had to euthanize a fish.  The preferred method, apparently,
is to put the fish in water with a little bit of clove oil (a few
drops per cup of water, IIRC) to knock it out.  Clove oil, BTW, is
what vets use to anesthetize fish for operations - and is found in
some toothache remedies.  Anyway, after the fish is unconscious, you
dump in some vodka (like 25% by volume of water or more, again IIRC)
to kill it.  If you go overboard with the clove oil you can also
potentially kill it, but leaving the fish in the vodka solution will
kill it - for this fish it took probably just a few minutes before it
totally stopped breathing.  And this was the cheapest vodka I could
get - It probably would've knocked *me* out if I'd drank any of it. :)

Granted, 25% by volume is a rather high concentration, and I probably
went over that, but I wasn't really interested in seeing just how
little I could get away with, and the fish was pretty sick anyway (had
stopped eating several days prior, couldn't swim properly for weeks,
etc) so it wouldn't have been an ideal specimen to test on.

--Danny
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