Need asssitance, additional fish keep dying in reef tank.

Budman17r · Mar 16, 2021

So I have a 60G cube, that has been doing really well. However we've had a string of deaths lately, that have us perplexed.

Current Water Params:
Salinity 1.025
Nitrate 1-2 PPM (red sea)
Ammonia 0 (red sea)
Nitrite 0 (red sea)
Phosphate (0.08) Hanna
Calcium 450
Alk 12 dkh (red sea)
Magnesium 1400
Temp 78.1-78.7

Original Post: Flipped Nitrite and Nitrate

Current Fish (that have been alive for months)
Six line Wrasse
2 Clown Fish
1 Blue Green Chromi

Other Items in tank (for months)
3 Turbo Snails
4 Hermit Crabs
Multiple other snails (totals of 8) Cerith, Tronchus etc)
Porcelain Anemone Crab.

Coral:
Green Star Polyp
Torch Coral,
Fogspawn x2
Birds of Paradise,
Clove Polyp
2 Monti Caps
Scoly Coral

Equipment:
Kalkwasser reactor on dosing pump dosing 1000 ml a day
Tunze ATO
Reef Octopus 110S skimmer
CW 100 Scrubber
Apex
2 Vortech Mp40 at about 12-20%
2 Wide Flow Guards for the mp40.

Food:

Small amounts 3 times a day:
Neptune Pellets
Spirula Flake food
Frozen Myosis Shrimp in the evening (we give about 3 spoon full and we spread it out over 3 days)
Situation:
We went to add some new fish, and it appears any new fish that we add is dying, sometimes in 2 weeks, and its been getting worse. (the existing fish seem unphased and unaffected).

We got a blue green chromi, and a Yellow Watchman gobi.

The yellow watchman goby died after 5 days. It was very tiny, and the powerhead slipped to the bottom of the tank causing a sandstorm, we figured this was the cause.

At the same time of getting the Goby, we got another blue green chromi, it lived for about 2 weeks, was eating fine, and was generally behaving well. Again no damage to the body.

This last fish, (Royal Gramma) we added. It lived for about 2 Days (was added on Saturday night) Drip Acclimation, With the anemone crab which is still alive). Saturday afternoon the fish found a hiding hole, and was great. Sunday during the day, the fish was near its hiding hole and was swimming around. No other fish seemed to care about it. Monday, it stayed in the hole, and Tuesday morning we found it dead.

This one I got pictures of.

Current thoughts:
Is it the Alkalinity?
Is it six line wrasse (which I didn't see any evidence of attacks)
Was it the clown fish
Was it a killer in the rocks?

I am fairly new to the hobby and have been taking a lot of advice from my LFS, BRS, here, etc. I don't want anymore fish deaths, and I want the tank to flourish. Any advice/help would be great!

fishguy242 · Mar 16, 2021

@Jay Hemdal @vetteguy53081 ?

Jay Hemdal · Mar 16, 2021

Budman17r said:
So I have a 60G cube, that has been doing really well. However we've had a string of deaths lately, that have us perplexed.

Current Water Params:
Salinity 1.025
Nitrate 0 PPM (red sea)
Ammonia 0 (red sea)
Nitrite 1-2 PPM (red sea)
Phosphate (0.08) Hanna
Calcium 450
Alk 12 dkh (red sea)
Magnesium 1400
Temp 78.1-78.7

Current Fish (that have been alive for months)
Six line Wrasse
2 Clown Fish
1 Blue Green Chromi

Other Items in tank (for months)
3 Turbo Snails
4 Hermit Crabs
Multiple other snails (totals of 8) Cerith, Tronchus etc)
Porcelain Anemone Crab.

Coral:
Green Star Polyp
Torch Coral,
Fogspawn x2
Birds of Paradise,
Clove Polyp
2 Monti Caps
Scoly Coral

Equipment:
Kalkwasser reactor on dosing pump dosing 1000 ml a day
Tunze ATO
Reef Octopus 110S skimmer
CW 100 Scrubber
Apex
2 Vortech Mp40 at about 12-20%
2 Wide Flow Guards for the mp40.

Food:

Small amounts 3 times a day:
Neptune Pellets
Spirula Flake food
Frozen Myosis Shrimp in the evening (we give about 3 spoon full and we spread it out over 3 days)
Situation:
We went to add some new fish, and it appears any new fish that we add is dying, sometimes in 2 weeks, and its been getting worse. (the existing fish seem unphased and unaffected).

We got a blue green chromi, and a Yellow Watchman gobi.

The yellow watchman goby died after 5 days. It was very tiny, and the powerhead slipped to the bottom of the tank causing a sandstorm, we figured this was the cause.

At the same time of getting the Goby, we got another blue green chromi, it lived for about 2 weeks, was eating fine, and was generally behaving well. Again no damage to the body.

This last fish, (Royal Gramma) we added. It lived for about 2 Days (was added on Saturday night) Drip Acclimation, With the anemone crab which is still alive). Saturday afternoon the fish found a hiding hole, and was great. Sunday during the day, the fish was near its hiding hole and was swimming around. No other fish seemed to care about it. Monday, it stayed in the hole, and Tuesday morning we found it dead.

This one I got pictures of.

Current thoughts:
Is it the Alkalinity?
Is it six line wrasse (which I didn't see any evidence of attacks)
Was it the clown fish
Was it a killer in the rocks?

I am fairly new to the hobby and have been taking a lot of advice from my LFS, BRS, here, etc. I don't want anymore fish deaths, and I want the tank to flourish. Any advice/help would be great!

The general rule is that if all of the invertebrates are thriving, but the fish are dying, then the problem is not with the water or the environment, but rather, with the fish themselves.
It is probable that the fish have had unrelated issues. I would strongly urge you to quarantine any new fish going forward, or if that isn’t possible, then but pre quarantined fish. The risk of introducing a contagious disease is so great, I just think you need to mitigate that.

Jay

Rmckoy · Mar 16, 2021

I noticed nitrates are 0ppm which is never a good thing ..
and nitrites are 1-2 can we assume testing error ?

Budman17r · Mar 16, 2021

Rmckoy said:
I noticed nitrates are 0ppm which is never a good thing ..
and nitrites are 1-2 can we assume testing error ?

Yes I may have inverted the numbers. The one that should be 0 is.

Budman17r · Mar 16, 2021

Yes nitrates are 1-2 nitrites are 0 I just wrote it wrong I'm sorry about that

Rmckoy · Mar 16, 2021

I assumed it was backwards .

Budman17r · Mar 16, 2021

I don't know if this helps but overall pic of tank

brandon429 · Mar 16, 2021

extremely nice reef!

in all my cycling threads, new reefers are advised of an approximate 80%+ loss rate within six mos by skipping fallow and qt, or even breaking the protocol chain slightly.

marine fish keeping= quite the headache, but isn't all cutting edge science.

Budman17r · Mar 16, 2021

its so weird, the first 4 fish, are (as it would seem) healthy as horses. Every additional one seems to be the issue.

And thank you, I just don't want to keep killing fish.

First week I didn't do a water change (cause I had some slight dinos I think, they went away in a day or two. 4 days prior to the royal gramma addition.

The one GSP is angry for whatever reason, I'm blaming the hermit crabs I see them on it a lot.

Heck the porcelain crab somehow got on the power head, and lives there now.

Snails are doing well.
The clown fish are constantly swimming exploring, the six line wrasse running around the rocks, and the blue/green chromi eats like a pig. (well they all do but it's the worst one)

I was thinking 1 is a fluke, 2 is highly unlikely and 3 is a trend.

I also started running carbon to make sure everything is ok.

brandon429 · Mar 16, 2021

those fish are the toughest ones so far in the group. very nice system I like the open scape swimming room.

Budman17r · Mar 16, 2021

The scoly is where the Gramma liked to stay, could that have caused the problem?

And thank you all for the kind words. I've been enjoying this (expensive) hobby I just don't want to cause harm).

brandon429 · Mar 16, 2021

nobody can tell without a necropsy but it wont matter due to the stats. Fish can certainly die of non disease causes and stings but it wont alter known course. eventually the strong ones are likely to succumb but not 100% of the time, just the majority.

1000000000% of all forms of no quarantine advice comes from the 20% fraction of choice sets-meaning they weren't the ones who lose fish 80% of the time. what keeps the majority of fish alive in contemporary tanks is simply qt and fallow, not the rarer option.

Budman17r · Mar 16, 2021

Rgr that I will setup a Quarantine tank, I'll start going down those threads!

Thank you all for your help!

stanleo · Mar 16, 2021

Chromis are schooling fish in the wild but in a reef tank one will always kill the other. You may not see the damage but the stress of constant attacks takes it’s toll on immune systems.
A clown fish pair can be brutal when defending an established territory. That may be what happened to the gramma. Try again with an acclimation box for a few days and hanging a mirror on the outside of the tank.
The goby may have died like you said or just not a good fish to begin with.
I thought too that I couldn’t add anymore fish to my tank until I tried an acclimation box and the mirror trick.