weird fish injury

this morning i noticed that one of my leaf fish was in distress, laying on the bottom of the tank with it's mouth fully distended. another one of the leaf fish was hovering nearby watching. i had to go run some errands and when i got back home i checked on the little guy again - more closely.
i noticed that indeed there was a tail fin sticking out of his mouth. he'd tried to eat a fish and was unsuccessful.
so i netted my little leaf fish and got my tweezers. with some effort i pulled out the mostly ingested fish. It's a really small fish and i'm surprised that he wasn't able to eat it entirely, it has some kind of sucker on it and it took a couple of good yanks to get it out with a bunch of unpleasant noises (like taking the hook out of a fish)... Surprisingly, the little ingested fish swam away (minus half of his tail fin...sorry). My leaf fish's mouth stayed completely distended for a while but it looks like he managed to get it back in place. i hope he doesn't die, i know he will from starvation if something happened when the prey fish hooked himself in the leaf fish's stomach (or at least on it's way there).

Anyway, my first time doing fish foreign body removal and thought i'd share!

Wow that is crazy. Did you remove the "prey" fish from the tank?

no. i can't say how surprised i was when it darted away. I thought for sure it would be dead.
i saw it this morning during feeding.
that tank is so heavily planted and the fish is sooo small (I don't even know what it is).
If I can catch it I'll move it over to the angel tank.

When I worked at Petco I'd see this happen a lot. Either the oscars or African cichlids would try to eat a small catfish or pleco and get stuck. Usually the smaller fish was dead and a few times the larger fish also. That's the problem with mixing big fish with small catfish. Any other fish would have been eaten and not cause any problems.

Good to hear that both fish are alive. Hope they do well.