Bangai dying of old age.

[Timfish]

My condolences! Iv'e always found it a conflicitng mix of sadness, loss, helplessness and accomplishment watching an old fish slowly decline.

 

[Timfish]

On a more general note here's some thoughts in response to some of the comments posted. For those interested in clove oil, here's a link. There ahve been numerous times I've seen fish get old and die and the best way I can describe it is they get "ratty" looking just like and old dog or cat if that makes sense. But others I've known to be pretty old just dissappear or show up dead with no obvious signs of a problem. They can die of other causes also which we have no control over. One experience I had was a Coral Beauty that showed up dead that looked great and ate and swam normally the day before but examining it had a soft spot on the side of it's skull, with no outward indicators of a problem it seems it was some type of cancer or disease that would cause bone deterioration.

We really don't know what the life expectancies of our fish should be in our aquariums. This study shows Bicolor dwarf angels live between 1 and 13 years, 10-11 years seems an reasonable average for dwarf angels based on what I've seen in my tanks with some living much longer (and there's this report of one over 21 years). (Kinda like cats, 14 is a good average, 20 is commonly seen but an occasional outlier will live past 30.) Delbeek's given an example of a goby pair living 5 times longer than their wild counter parts and PaulB has a pair of clowns significantly past the max for a wild clown so we shouldn't be surprised or maybe should expect and prepare for some of our fish living many decades (1).

 

[Paul B]

Here is a video of my Watchman gobi that was dying from old age. His mate died a few weeks later. I think they were about 10 or 12 years old.