reefdiver73
Community Member
Hi all, we have a 300 gallon aquarium with 12 fish in it. Down from 16 and one of the 12 looks very unhealthy. Longer version: We recently acquired this tank. All the original batch of fish were put into a quarantine system while the 300 gallon tank was moved. During that quarantine time where the fish were in temporary housing we lost two fish. We hurried to get the tank set up and got everyone transferred into the new tank. At the same time, we decided to go ahead and get rid of a small tank that had two clownfish and a chromis in it and so we added them as well. Then we got ahead of ourselves and went out and bought a few new fish to add to the complicated scenario. Long story short, we don't know where the sickness came from, whether it was the original fish or something new we bought, but here we are, so, please help me by focusing on what we can do from this point forward as opposed to what we should have done. I know we should have done things differently...
We have the following fish that still appear healthy: Purple Tang, Lavender Tang, Orange Shoulder Tang, two firefish, a female anthias, a Watchman Goby, another type of Goby, opossom wrasse, long nose hawk, a midas blenny, and a flame hawk... We have a banana eel that hasn't eaten in a week, but that's not necessarily uncommon.
We lost some recent additions, which we failed to separately quarantine first. Since everyone was new to to the tank we just added everyone to the tank within a couple of weeks of each other. Well, apparently that was a bad idea. We have lost a male anthias, a blue star wrasse, a royal gramma, which were all very new additions. Then our male clownfish that we've had for 7 or 8 years died. Now the female clown that we've also had for 7 or 8 years is very sick looking. This is in addition to the two fish that died previous to us adding everyone to the newly set up system.
As far as tank parameters are concerned everything appears to be good enough to sustain life: pH: 8.2, Salt: 1.026, Temp: 77-78, Alk: 7.41, Ca: 403, Mg: 1308, Nitrates: 16 -- all measured with a combination of Hanna and Apex Trident.
What does this look like, and what should we do about this? We have corals that all seem fine so this is just affecting the fish as far as we know. Catching the fish to put them into a separate quarantine tank is going to be near impossible without tearing down the tank, so if we can do something to treat in place that would be ideal. We are working to get the clown out of the tank, however, because he definitely looks sick.
Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
We have the following fish that still appear healthy: Purple Tang, Lavender Tang, Orange Shoulder Tang, two firefish, a female anthias, a Watchman Goby, another type of Goby, opossom wrasse, long nose hawk, a midas blenny, and a flame hawk... We have a banana eel that hasn't eaten in a week, but that's not necessarily uncommon.
We lost some recent additions, which we failed to separately quarantine first. Since everyone was new to to the tank we just added everyone to the tank within a couple of weeks of each other. Well, apparently that was a bad idea. We have lost a male anthias, a blue star wrasse, a royal gramma, which were all very new additions. Then our male clownfish that we've had for 7 or 8 years died. Now the female clown that we've also had for 7 or 8 years is very sick looking. This is in addition to the two fish that died previous to us adding everyone to the newly set up system.
As far as tank parameters are concerned everything appears to be good enough to sustain life: pH: 8.2, Salt: 1.026, Temp: 77-78, Alk: 7.41, Ca: 403, Mg: 1308, Nitrates: 16 -- all measured with a combination of Hanna and Apex Trident.
What does this look like, and what should we do about this? We have corals that all seem fine so this is just affecting the fish as far as we know. Catching the fish to put them into a separate quarantine tank is going to be near impossible without tearing down the tank, so if we can do something to treat in place that would be ideal. We are working to get the clown out of the tank, however, because he definitely looks sick.
Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
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