Fish are dying! Help!

[reses12]

Hey everyone! I'm new to this forum, but I really need some extra brains for this as I am at a loss!

I have a 150 gallon aquarium I maintain and have lost five fish in 12 hrs. Yesterday after cleaning up the aquarium I added some new fish: a blue hippo tang, bi-color dottyback, and a scopas tang. I also added three frags: red photsynthetic sponge, frogspawn, and GSP.
Before adding these critters I took out around 7-8 small top rocks and cleaned them off in the sink to remove hair algae and red cyano from them. One other small rock had this bright yellow slime substance that I attempted to remove also. I put them back in the aquarium with some de-chlorinator and brushed off the remaining rocks and netted the dislodged hair algae. I also added a new bag of Chemi-Pure into the sump from Drs Foster and Smith.
Before cleaning and adding the livestock I tested the water parameters and they were as follows:
Salinity 1.025
Alk 10.4
Calcium 420
Mag 1275
Ammonia 0
Nitrite 0
Nitrate 25
A couple hours later I lost the bi-color dottyback. Followed shortly by a clownfish. Then overnight I lost the blue hippo tang, a fairy wrasse, another clownfish, and a coral beauty angel. None of these showed any signs of disease before their death.
What the heck went wrong?? Any insight would be greatly appreciated!
Note: I will not have access to the aquarium until tomorrow to retest the water parameters.

 

[4FordFamily]

Wow, first of all welcome home to Reef2Reef, I wish it was under better circumstances!

With that many deaths I’m guessing either disease or contaminate. Did you or anyone clean with anything near the tank?

How do the coral look? If they seem largely unaffected that leads us to disease.

Were these fish quarantined? If not due to the fish deaths I’m highly suspect of velvet. Some strains don’t show standard outward symptoms like spots but do immense damage in the gills and kill fish quickly.

Were any fish hiding from light, swimming in to powerheads, losing color, or breathing heavily?

 

[4FordFamily]

Also, please respond to coral question because if the coral seem fine then we can rule out contaminates most likely, as they’d impact the corals perhaps more. Then I can move this to the disease forum if need be for faster replies.

 

[Crabs McJones]

Hey everyone! I'm new to this forum, but I really need some extra brains for this as I am at a loss!

I have a 150 gallon aquarium I maintain and have lost five fish in 12 hrs. Yesterday after cleaning up the aquarium I added some new fish: a blue hippo tang, bi-color dottyback, and a scopas tang. I also added three frags: red photsynthetic sponge, frogspawn, and GSP.
Before adding these critters I took out around 7-8 small top rocks and cleaned them off in the sink to remove hair algae and red cyano from them. One other small rock had this bright yellow slime substance that I attempted to remove also. I put them back in the aquarium with some de-chlorinator and brushed off the remaining rocks and netted the dislodged hair algae. I also added a new bag of Chemi-Pure into the sump from Drs Foster and Smith.
Before cleaning and adding the livestock I tested the water parameters and they were as follows:
Salinity 1.025
Alk 10.4
Calcium 420
Mag 1275
Ammonia 0
Nitrite 0
Nitrate 25
A couple hours later I lost the bi-color dottyback. Followed shortly by a clownfish. Then overnight I lost the blue hippo tang, a fairy wrasse, another clownfish, and a coral beauty angel. None of these showed any signs of disease before their death.
What the heck went wrong?? Any insight would be greatly appreciated!
Note: I will not have access to the aquarium until tomorrow to retest the water parameters.

Welcome to R2R!! My guess is that when you cleaned the aquarium and added the new fish, you introduced a parasite to the tank. If it's killing the fish that fast, the likely culprit is velvet. Were the fish quarantined or anything before adding them to this system? When you removed and scrubbed the rock in the sink, you didn't rinse the rock off with tap water did you? If you did that may also be the culprit. Not only did you add tap water and the chemicals and nutrients associated with it, anything on the rock most likely died and is decaying causeing an ammonia spike.

 

[reses12]

Wow, first of all welcome home to Reef2Reef, I wish it was under better circumstances!

With that many deaths I’m guessing either disease or contaminate. Did you or anyone clean with anything near the tank?

How do the coral look? If they seem largely unaffected that leads us to disease.

Were these fish quarantined? If not due to the fish deaths I’m highly suspect of velvet. Some strains don’t show standard outward symptoms like spots but do immense damage in the gills and kill fish quickly.

Were any fish hiding from light, swimming in to powerheads, losing color, or breathing heavily?

Thanks for the welcome! I review the forum;s on

Also, please respond to coral question because if the coral seem fine then we can rule out contaminates most likely, as they’d impact the corals perhaps more. Then I can move this to the disease forum if need be for faster replies.

Thanks for the welcome! I always read these forums, but never needed to ask a question!
This aquarium is at a business and I'm working on them sending me a picture of the tank to check coral health as I cannot be there today. They also cannot find the scopas tang that was delivered yesterday.

The fish were ordered and delivered a day late on Saturday. They stayed in my home aquarium until Monday afternoon when the business was open. They were not QT'd. One of the ones that had been in the aquarium for three weeks had white stringy poop and was listless yesterday, but other than that the other's looked fine. Anyone know what the mystery mustard colored substance might have been yesterday?

 

[reses12]

Welcome to R2R!! My guess is that when you cleaned the aquarium and added the new fish, you introduced a parasite to the tank. If it's killing the fish that fast, the likely culprit is velvet. Were the fish quarantined or anything before adding them to this system? When you removed and scrubbed the rock in the sink, you didn't rinse the rock off with tap water did you? If you did that may also be the culprit. Not only did you add tap water and the chemicals and nutrients associated with it, anything on the rock most likely died and is decaying causeing an ammonia spike.

I did rinse with tap water during the cleaning process, but these rocks have only been in the aquarium for three weeks and had mostly pest algae growing all over them. The amount of rocks taken out and cleaned accounted for maybe 5% of the total rocks in the aquarium.

Also I asked the business manager about any kind of candles or chemicals being used near the aquarium by the cleaning crew, and he advised they didn't use anything near the aquarium.

 

[ilyad]

I am not 100% sure what may have been the exact cause, but its quite possible that you may have caused a cycle in your tank. By taking out the rock out of the tank and running it under tap, you surely killed off a lot of bio matter on the rock. That coupled with 3 fish being added at once (2 of which are fairly large), must have triggered a cycle. Then as one fish dies, it also exacerbates the problem.

Edit: between me reading and responding, I see a lot more was added (I had stepped away from the computer). If the rocks only account for 5%, unlikely that it caused a problem by washing rock due to die off. However, tap could have had contaminant. Its never a good idea to use tap, if anything, use RO or SW.

White stringy poop almost always means an internal parasite. Other's here are better versed in fish disease than I am, so I'll leave it to them to respond.

But that being said, how young is the tank? Possible that adding 3 fish at once was too quick for that tank if its not established well enough yet.

 

[reses12]

I am not 100% sure what may have been the exact cause, but its quite possible that you may have caused a cycle in your tank. By taking out the rock out of the tank and running it under tap, you surely killed off a lot of bio matter on the rock. That coupled with 3 fish being added at once (2 of which are fairly large), must have triggered a cycle. Then as one fish dies, it also exacerbates the problem.

Edit: between me reading and responding, I see a lot more was added (I had stepped away from the computer). If the rocks only account for 5%, unlikely that it caused a problem by washing rock due to die off. However, tap could have had contaminant. Its never a good idea to use tap, if anything, use RO or SW.

White stringy poop almost always means an internal parasite. Other's here are better versed in fish disease than I am, so I'll leave it to them to respond.

But that being said, how young is the tank? Possible that adding 3 fish at once was too quick for that tank if its not established well enough yet.

The aquarium is several years old. I have been slowly adding fish since taking over its maintenance. The blue hippo tang was tiny, about 1 inch, while the scopas was about 2.5 inches. I don't believe it was too many fish to handle for 150 gallons being that they were on the small side.
I didn't know it was possible for any disease to kill the fish so quickly. With the mass die off I was assuming that it was some kind of contaminate. I still haven't received any pics yet of the corals. Is it possible the chemi pure was contaminated? Or any input on that yellow slime I tried to remove maybe?

 

[reses12]

Here are the pics of the corals. They’re pretty blurry, but look like they are mostly out and happyish. I didn’t take a close up of the sponge as it looked the same as yesterday.

 

[Bayareareefer18]

What did you use to scrub rocks? Household sponge perhaps?

 

[reses12]

What did you use to scrub rocks? Household sponge perhaps?

I have a grout brush that is dedicated for aquarium use only.

 

[reses12]

Any other ideas anyone? I'll be testing it tomorrow to check for cycling just in case.

 

[reses12]

So interesting revelation. Upon researching all day on this issue, I found some information on another forum about toxic cyanobacteria that can release spores and kill fish. Very interesting reads, and I think maybe a more likely scenario from the quick death of 90% of the fish? Especially since I removed some yesterday and maybe stirred up the rest?

 

[4FordFamily]

Did I understand you correctly that your fish were kept in a temp tank for some time before addition to the tank and then their demise shortly after?

If so I suspect ammonia in the temp tank.

A swing in water parems from temp to DT can also do them in quickly

 

[reses12]

Yes you read that correctly. They were kept in my personal home reef aquarium where my fish and corals are happy as can be. They stayed in there for about 36 hrs.
I do believe after lots of research today that the tank I put them in has a toxic cyanobacteria that I dislodged with the cleaning.

 

[OriginalUserName]

Yes you read that correctly. They were kept in my personal home reef aquarium where my fish and corals are happy as can be. They stayed in there for about 36 hrs.
I do believe after lots of research today that the tank I put them in has a toxic cyanobacteria that I dislodged with the cleaning.

Sounds like a reasonable explanation. For that much volume a small cycle is not going to kill fish that fast.

 

[JonPhillips]

Sounds like a case of the Mondays!