Hello. I had a few questions regarding what I should do here. So recently I got an ocellaris clownfish pair and its getting along well enough (as well as you can expect) with my yellowtail damsel. The tank is a 30 gallon and has about 30 lb. of live rock, give or take, and has a deep 5-inch sandbed. The tank is established, having been running for 18 months now, with tons of pods, coralline algae, etc. I'd like to get a new orchid dottyback to add a splash of purple, occupy the left side of my live rock, provide a bit more nitrate for my corals (because it was basically 0 before and was told that around 5ppm is a healthier amount for the zooxanthelae) and to further help keep my damsel in check. I was wondering if that would work out, not only in terms of aggression, but also the nitrogen cycle...
...which brings me to my second question. There was a crash in my tank about 5-6 months back, in which I had a banggai cardinal, a clownfish pair, and an orchid dottyback. One died and soon the others followed suite, after I've had the fish for a couple months prior to that. I may have been dosing too much with the calcium and alkalinity, as well as iron, and I wonder if that was what killed the fish, or if having four fish in my 30 gallon tank was too much, and as they grew, the ammonia build up became too much for my bacteria to convert, despite the amount of live rock and sand I had in there. I didn't see any signs of any possible infection or disease on any of them, I bought them all captive-bred, and they were doing fine and growing over the course of those few months, until eventually the crash happened.
I'm afraid that if I get an orchid dottyback in the tank I have set up, it might lead to another crash, if it was an issue with ammonia/nitrite/nitrate. If you guys think maybe it was an issue with dosing or even a disease, then I think I'll get the purple fish.
Here's a picture of the tank so you know how much rock/sand there is, relative to the water. As you can see the damsel hangs out in the caves to the right side and I have no fish occupying the caves on the left.
...which brings me to my second question. There was a crash in my tank about 5-6 months back, in which I had a banggai cardinal, a clownfish pair, and an orchid dottyback. One died and soon the others followed suite, after I've had the fish for a couple months prior to that. I may have been dosing too much with the calcium and alkalinity, as well as iron, and I wonder if that was what killed the fish, or if having four fish in my 30 gallon tank was too much, and as they grew, the ammonia build up became too much for my bacteria to convert, despite the amount of live rock and sand I had in there. I didn't see any signs of any possible infection or disease on any of them, I bought them all captive-bred, and they were doing fine and growing over the course of those few months, until eventually the crash happened.
I'm afraid that if I get an orchid dottyback in the tank I have set up, it might lead to another crash, if it was an issue with ammonia/nitrite/nitrate. If you guys think maybe it was an issue with dosing or even a disease, then I think I'll get the purple fish.
Here's a picture of the tank so you know how much rock/sand there is, relative to the water. As you can see the damsel hangs out in the caves to the right side and I have no fish occupying the caves on the left.