Matt Kaufman
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Way back when, before the dawn of time, an engineer friend and I built a centralized filter system for around a dozen small killi tanks - 2.5, 10, 20L. Each tank had a return that was simply a bit of vinyl hose that in turn had one of those 'inlet filter' things you get for power filter inlets shoved into it.
The central filter was a wet/dry filter, where 'dry' part had a 'drip plate' comprised of an old UGF filter plate, atop a bucket full of 'bio balls' which were smallish orange plastic things, very spiky. The wet part was the same - I had won a big trash bag full of the things in some fish club raffle somewhere and had really no other use for it.
Well, on occasion, one of the inlets would come off and some killies or others, usually gardneri (I grew a LOT of gardneri this way, the filter actually worked great except for the occasional overflow in the sump), would travel up the hose. Through the manifold (a bunch of 1/2" and 1" PVC as I recall), then past the drip plate which didn't completely seal off the top of the dry section, past the bioballs into the wet section where they merrily swam around till I nettted them out. I did pull out the occasional deader from the dry section where it had gotten speared on a bioball.
I eventually put sponge filters on the inlets. That stopped the migration, but the noise of the filter system pump eventually annoyed me enough that I switched each tank to be a separate standalone tank with box & sponge filters. That didn't work nearly as well.
Moral: They're hardier than you think.
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