The Good The Bad And The Ugly – A Reefkeeper’s Journal

[WDLV]

I know I haven't updated this in a while but the male healed up and was doing great until....
I woke this morning to see my male latz dead. I have no idea why. Yesterday he was fat and healthy, feeding with gusto.

I'm totally confused. I dropped the temp from 75 to 73 a few days ago, but I can't imagine that would do it.

[rc4kinu]

Oh man! sorry about that. I wouldn't think that a 2 degree drop would have done that. I had that happened a couple of times this winter when we got really cold here if FL and I forgot to plug the heater on. No problems though. Maybe he had something internally wrong that was not so outwardly visable. I wonder myself sometimes when I see my female practically laying down in front of the cleaner shrimp wanting a cleaning when I don't see outward symptoms.

[WDLV]

The day got worse. I didn't want to post yesterday 'cause I was losing it.
When I have a fish die I like to transfer their mate to another tank so that if any contaminant is in the water it will not affect the remaining fish. I took out the female and put her in a small container so that she could acclimate to the new tank. About that time I heard my son starting to wake up. So, I went upstairs to get him up, change his diaper, put some clothes on him and get him some breakfast. I put on a movie to keep him occupied so that I could go back down to finish acclimating the fish. It was more than an hour later and when I got to the tank she was dead from suffocation.
I think I will hold off on buying any more for a while. At least until I can set up a proper reef tank with an established anemone.

Honestly I think the male's death was my fault too. I noticed on Thursday that the water was building up with gelbstoff and mixed up a batch of saltwater so I could do a change Saturday. Well the wife reminded me that we had a wedding to go to Saturday. So, I figured I'd do the WC on Sunday. Well, the female had not been passing Wilkerson's DLR test over the last few days. She was very easily excitable. If I passed by the tank she'd jump and hit the egg crate. This was not her normal disposition.... but there were no outward signs of injury or disease and their color looked great.

[thewetdog]

I've found these fish to be very sturdy until they hop off the track. Once they're even a little stressed, they're very hard to get back on track. Just curious; did anything change outside their tank that they could see or hear?

[WDLV]

No. The only change was the 2 degree temperature adjustment.
I really think there was ammonia build up despite my having changed the filter cartridge the week before. It makes sense given the gelbstoff and the frantic behavior.
What it boils down to is that I have too many clowns for the amount of time I can dedicate to them.


I moved my thiellei clowns into a larger tank yesterday. It's a 45 cube with just a HOB power filter, a heater, a PH and a MH overhead. I'm planning to add a HOB skimmer when I get home today. Since all the intakes have sponges on them I will probably just need a skimmer to run it and can swap out the powerhead sponge filters as needed. The only reason I might need a power filter is for carbon addition. That might make a sump worth while.