Lost a Seahorse

thecodingart

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Sometime last week, one of our 2 seahorses refused to latch and had some fairly poor behaviors where she started refused to eat. The situation reached a peak where we were dipping her in methylene blue for 30-45 minutes at a time with a bubbler + tube feeding him seachem mixed paste from mysis or seachem soaked live brine.

We reached out to Alyssa from seahorse savvy and pretty much confirmed we were doing all we could to keep the little girl alive. We are still unsure of the full root cause but had a theory that something may have triggered tail rot as latching was the first thing to stop and the tip of the tail turned slightly white over the next few days (the temperature one day fluctuated 5-10 degrees due to some power stuff and hit up from 73 degrees to 80 degrees, after this seemed to be when the behavioral change took in effect).

Our other seahorse & pipefish are fine and we've been monitoring them accordingly with no issues.

I've taken a few pictures below and am curious if anyone here might have an idea of the cause. The ammonia did have a slight spike to 1.0 ppm, honestly this shouldn't have had any effect, NO2 around 0, and the NO3 is around 20ppm (I'm prepping to install a nano algae scrubber).

There was a point where she seemed to be doing better, then we came home today to her dead.

You can see there's some whiteness around the anal fin and we did notice long string poop too.

These guys were extremely young when we got them a few months ago and only recently grew to this size (they are Erectus). I'm hoping I can replace this guy and bond a new seahorse with the other before that phase has passed and it's too late.

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