The risk is very high for sure.
Holy Cow!!! Are you ever right Scott! I avoided a near disastrous situation last night. First of all I have a 29 gallon Biocube. The hood sits directly on top of the tank. I have done a light retro in the hood and I have a 150 watt MH with 2 double actinics. To facilitate cooling I keep both the front and back lids open. I use the plastic gutter screen to cover both front and rear openings.
Yesterday, I was doing some tank maintenance and took both screens out while I was working on it. When I got finished, I put everything back together, or so I thought! I was watching T.V. and fell asleep on the couch. The Biocubes filtration does make some noise, like a waterfall effect. While I was asleep, I kept hearing a "splashing, sloshing" noise coming from the tank. But the noise would go away, I thought my water level was getting low and was the cause of the noise.
So I finally get up and using a flashlight, I start to investigate the noise. All of a sudden, it occurs to me, I don't see Digger. Something told me to look in the rear chambers, and sure enough, there was Digger looking up at me between the heater and the pump in one of the chambers. Man I tell ya, I breathed a big old sigh of relief! After removing the heater and the pump, I was able to get my hand down ther and I gently picked him up and placed him back in the tank!
As of this afternoon, he is back in one of his burrows in the front of the tank and doesn't look bad at all.
The thing is, while I had placed the screen back in the front of the tank, I forgot to put back the back one. Needless to say I learned first-hand a valuable lesson! BSJF will jump!
