Saltwaterjourney
New Member
Hello!
I’m from a particularly large country in Asia and after having spent about thirty of my thirty six years keeping freshwater fish, I finally set up my first saltwater aquarium. It was thanks to a culmination of factors of finally having the space, the funds and a friendly LFS who recently got into marine fish retail themselves.
I’ve found this site super educational and entertaining and it’s my go-to for pretty much every question that pops into my head - thank you all! I am more of a reader than a poster in general, but I had a very interesting experience recently that as far as I can tell no one else here has had, so I’d like to share the word of caution.
My tank is 4ftx1.5x1.5 and I have a 3 foot sump underneath. My LFS very kindly cycled a large number of bio bricks for me well in advance, and that as well as Arag alive sand and some bottled bacteria helped the cycle complete very quickly.
I soon found myself with 7 fish ( two Percula clowns, one Azure damsel, one small Scopas tang, one Bi colour blenny, one McCoskers flasher wrasse, one Yellow wrasse and one Firefish. The fish were added gradually in that order every week or two. I kept monitoring Ammonia, Nitrites and Nitrates and everything was going great.
About a month in I decided to add a few more snails and my LFS finally had the conch snails I wanted. I picked up two, brought them home and all was well. The conches happened to come home on the same trip as the yellow wrasse and Firefish. About three days in, I suddenly noticed that the Firefish was missing. It was eating well and out swimming confidently, but I chalked it down to the first loss that was bound to happen.
A few days later, I needed to travel on work and would leave the tank alone for 8 days. Arrangements were made for the fish to be fed and everything was in place. I returned and nervously checked that all was well and at first it seemed that it was. But then I realised that both the clown fish were missing. dang!
Again, just like with the Firefish, they disappeared without trace. No floating bodies, no ammonia spike, no sign of dead fish at all. I have a tight fitting net cover and I also checked the outside of the tank just to be sure. The overflow and sump were clear as well. Now this was really odd because the clowns were the first fish in the tank and I know they were both very healthy, probably the fittest of the lot.
For a while, I simply had no answers and that’s a terrible feeling. Deaths are to be expected but there’s a real problem if you can’t learn from them. After hours of obsessing over what it could be, it suddenly dawned on me!
I remembered that when I brought the conch snails home, one of them had a half devoured dead fish in it from the LFS tank. At the time, all I thought was oh what a good detritivore!
Then I remembered that I saw a conch half buried in exactly the same area as where the dartfish used to hang out. And THEN I remembered leaving the house in the middle of the night once to catch an early flight and seeing both conches out cruising on the glass . And guess who used to like hanging out hugging the glass at night? Yep, both the clowns.
A deep dive into killer conch snails online revealed nothing, but it did introduce me to the fascinating world of venomous cone snails. As it turns out, they’re super effective at killing small fish while they’re sleep! A late night hunting trip to find these two snails (they were too well hidden in the sand during the day) revealed what I can now say (with about 80 percent confidence ) that they are not conches, but are cone snails instead.
The snails were then very gingerly handled and returned to my LFS four days ago. So far, there have been no more mysterious deaths. I’m quite convinced that this has been the explanation for what happened, but, I’m sharing a couple of pictures and a video of the snails for the far more experienced folks on this forum to share their opinions.
Either way, this was a learning experience for both me and my LFS and something I thought would be valuable to share here as well. The ocean is full of incredibly fascinating, sometimes quite deadly creatures and this was a superb (but rather painfully expensive) lesson on how important it is to do your homework before buying.
I’m from a particularly large country in Asia and after having spent about thirty of my thirty six years keeping freshwater fish, I finally set up my first saltwater aquarium. It was thanks to a culmination of factors of finally having the space, the funds and a friendly LFS who recently got into marine fish retail themselves.
I’ve found this site super educational and entertaining and it’s my go-to for pretty much every question that pops into my head - thank you all! I am more of a reader than a poster in general, but I had a very interesting experience recently that as far as I can tell no one else here has had, so I’d like to share the word of caution.
My tank is 4ftx1.5x1.5 and I have a 3 foot sump underneath. My LFS very kindly cycled a large number of bio bricks for me well in advance, and that as well as Arag alive sand and some bottled bacteria helped the cycle complete very quickly.
I soon found myself with 7 fish ( two Percula clowns, one Azure damsel, one small Scopas tang, one Bi colour blenny, one McCoskers flasher wrasse, one Yellow wrasse and one Firefish. The fish were added gradually in that order every week or two. I kept monitoring Ammonia, Nitrites and Nitrates and everything was going great.
About a month in I decided to add a few more snails and my LFS finally had the conch snails I wanted. I picked up two, brought them home and all was well. The conches happened to come home on the same trip as the yellow wrasse and Firefish. About three days in, I suddenly noticed that the Firefish was missing. It was eating well and out swimming confidently, but I chalked it down to the first loss that was bound to happen.
A few days later, I needed to travel on work and would leave the tank alone for 8 days. Arrangements were made for the fish to be fed and everything was in place. I returned and nervously checked that all was well and at first it seemed that it was. But then I realised that both the clown fish were missing. dang!
Again, just like with the Firefish, they disappeared without trace. No floating bodies, no ammonia spike, no sign of dead fish at all. I have a tight fitting net cover and I also checked the outside of the tank just to be sure. The overflow and sump were clear as well. Now this was really odd because the clowns were the first fish in the tank and I know they were both very healthy, probably the fittest of the lot.
For a while, I simply had no answers and that’s a terrible feeling. Deaths are to be expected but there’s a real problem if you can’t learn from them. After hours of obsessing over what it could be, it suddenly dawned on me!
I remembered that when I brought the conch snails home, one of them had a half devoured dead fish in it from the LFS tank. At the time, all I thought was oh what a good detritivore!
Then I remembered that I saw a conch half buried in exactly the same area as where the dartfish used to hang out. And THEN I remembered leaving the house in the middle of the night once to catch an early flight and seeing both conches out cruising on the glass . And guess who used to like hanging out hugging the glass at night? Yep, both the clowns.
A deep dive into killer conch snails online revealed nothing, but it did introduce me to the fascinating world of venomous cone snails. As it turns out, they’re super effective at killing small fish while they’re sleep! A late night hunting trip to find these two snails (they were too well hidden in the sand during the day) revealed what I can now say (with about 80 percent confidence ) that they are not conches, but are cone snails instead.
The snails were then very gingerly handled and returned to my LFS four days ago. So far, there have been no more mysterious deaths. I’m quite convinced that this has been the explanation for what happened, but, I’m sharing a couple of pictures and a video of the snails for the far more experienced folks on this forum to share their opinions.
Either way, this was a learning experience for both me and my LFS and something I thought would be valuable to share here as well. The ocean is full of incredibly fascinating, sometimes quite deadly creatures and this was a superb (but rather painfully expensive) lesson on how important it is to do your homework before buying.
