‘The Fish Who Lived’: UK doctor rescues mystery goldfish found in his garden

A junior doctor named Ben Beska took to X and shared the tale of how he ended up rescuing and adopting a goldfish that mysteriously ended up on his lawn and the social media users were quick to react.

‘The Fish Who Lived’

Beska, a 33-year-old National Health Service (NHS) cardiology doctor from Newcastle, England shared the unlikely rescue story of the time when he saved a goldfish, which was “seconds from death,” found in his back garden.

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The NHS doctor said he saw a group of magpies squawking in his garden on Saturday (Jun 1) and went to see what was happening, and saw the goldfish lying in the grass.

“So today I found a goldfish just on the grass in my back garden. It was alive, I think, and have absolutely no idea where it came from. There’s no ponds anywhere near. So I took it inside….,” the 33-year-old said in one of the posts sharing an image of the goldfish.

Upon discovering the fish, Beska scrambled to put the “flapping” fish in an old freezer drawer full of water. “It was alive! Although not very happy in an old freezer drawer,” he said in a subsequent post.

In a later update on social media, he said that the fish was “much happier in an actual and hastily bought tank,” adding that he has a fish now.

He also posted a picture of the fish in its tank placed on what appeared to be a table alongside books and a lamp and wrote “Meet Alice (aka Lazarus, aka The Fish Who Lived)”.

In an interview with PA news agency, Beska said that he settled on the name Alice after a text message he sent to a friend regarding the goldfish autocorrected from “it’s alive” to “it’s alice”.

He said that he had found the fish moving on the grass and “couldn’t just leave it”.

“I locked my cats out of the kitchen, obviously, I didn’t want them to eat it, that would have been a terrible end to the story,” he told the news agency.

How did the fish end up in the garden?

A live goldfish in the middle of a lawn in Newcastle, but how did it end up there? Social media users and Beska said it is hardly a mystery and believe that the fish was being carried by a bird from a nearby pond and dropped while carrying it away.

However, since there are no ponds nearby, Beska said that the bird must have travelled a “reasonable distance”.

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The NHS doctor’s story has since gone viral with 15,000 likes on the original post, with many praising him for saving the fish, while others joking about it.

“Possibly caught by a bird from a local pond and then accidentally dropped as flew over your garden?” said one user responding to the NHS doctor asking how the fish ended up in his garden. Beska sarcastically replied and said, “No it walked into my garden.”

Alice the fish now has its own X account and its bio reads, "i’m a goldfish girl, in a goldfish world."

(With inputs from agencies)