Yellow Watchman Goby swimming at surface, possibly gasping for air after adding more sand to tank

[wwarby]

I have a yellow watchman goby in a 16 gallon tank. I added some more sand about an hour ago because the sandbed was a bit thin and the conch I added at the weekend seemed not to like it. It's CaribSea Ocean Direct sand. Anyway, it clouded the water as I expected it to and my LFS suggested the fish should be fine with this. I had previously done it with clowns and they seemed fine. The YWG is currently sharing the tank with a juvenile Royal Gramma and a juvenile banggai cardinal, both of which seem fine, but the YWG looks very stressed - it's swimming around near the surface which it never does. It doesn't seem to be gulping air repeatedly although it is surfacing completely once or twice a minute.

Not sure if I've made a serious error in judgement by adding the sand, or if the goby is just a bit confused by the change - I'm worried about him though. I have fresh salt water on hand so can do a water change if necessary.

In case oxygenation is the problem I've pointed the powerhead up at the surface to create more agitation (there was quite a lot already but more so now). Also just replaced the filter floss to get rid of any sand dust that it had already collected.

 

[vetteguy53081]

Please refrain from cross posting
The other thread you posted has been answered

 

[wwarby]

Erm... I think you may have me confused with someone else or a different topic maybe? Which thread are you talking about? To my knowledge this is the only thread I've started today and this only happened a couple of hours ago...

 

[wwarby]

The goby seems to have calmed down now. It ms sitting on top of a rock and it ate when I added some food to the tank. Would like to understand if what I did with the sand was dangerous though, or if I was reacting to something unimportant.

 

[wwarby]

As of this morning, all seems fine. Gave me a bit of a scare, but there should be no reason I have to do that again (adding more sand) so won't worry about it for now, although I'll ask in my LFS to see if they have any insight into why the YWG freaked out so much about the cloudy water.