Help! New to the saltwater world and need help

[sdulak]

Hi, I am very new to the saltwater world and I am having a lot of trouble with my tank. I have a 37 gallon biowheel tank, i have had it since late October. I have had about 10 fish die on me 1 after each other. I have the saltwater master test kit and all my tests (PH, Amm,Nitrates,Nitrites) have always test where they should and my salinity is 1023-1026 and the water temp varies between 76-79. All I have left in my task now is 2-fire shrimp, 2-peppermint shrinp, choc. chip starfish, 1-clown,snails and hermit crabs. Today I noticed my starfish has white spots on him. Any ideas what the spots are? Besides the starfish what other reasons would there be wrong with losing every fish I have put in the tank (yellow tang,salfin tang,2- clowns, hippo tang,henniocus, those are the fish that have died and no they were not all in the tank at the same time, when a few died I went out and bought more. As I said all my test kits came back fine what am I doing wrong??

 

[hart24601]

Welcome to the site! You didn't detect ammonia when the fish were dying? That would be my 1st suspect. What did they look like when dead? Any spots or disease or breathing at surface?

 

[SeahorseKeeper]

Welcome to R2R!! Sorry to hear about the troubles with your tank. This hobby can be frustrating at times. Can you tell us about your setup and how you cycled the tank? Also, I would focus on keeping the salinity consistent. Can you setup a quarantine tank? This way you can isolate new additions and watch/treat them for disease before putting them in your display tank. In looking at the fish that you have lost, a few of them are considered hard to keep and need a much larger tank to thrive.

 

[jent]

These fish likely were very stressed in a small 37gal aquarium:
* yellow tang
* salfin tang
* hippo tang
* henniocus

Avoid any kind of tang in that sized aquarium. It's possible that they died from stress. It's also possible that they may not have died from stress directly, but been stressed enough to weaken their immune system till they contracted a disease. This may have caused them to die from the disease, or spread the disease to other fish.

 

[BOMPH]

These fish likely were very stressed in a small 37gal aquarium:
* yellow tang
* salfin tang
* hippo tang
* henniocus

Avoid any kind of tang in that sized aquarium. It's possible that they died from stress. It's also possible that they may not have died from stress directly, but been stressed enough to weaken their immune system till they contracted a disease. This may have caused them to die from the disease, or spread the disease to other fish.

I would agree with this, not trying to be a Tang policeman, but these fish need room to be happy.

You could also have a contaminant in your water. Maybe some carbon might help if you're not running it already

 

[GreatWhiteTang]

Agree with the above posters, try smaller fish and one at a time after a quarantine period and see how it goes. More information on filtration and water being used 2?

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