Help!

[Shayriv62]

Hello I am a brand new Saltwater Hobbyist and currently have a 150 gallon FOWLR saltwater tank that has been running for a month now. I am at a loss. My tank has cycled and all the parameters are where they need to be (Salinity-1.025, 0ppm Ammonia, 8.0-PH, 0ppm Nitrite) and currently have 2 clownfish, a tiny yellow belly regal tang, 2 bengai Cardinalfish, a royal gramma, an African Red Knob Starfish, and some hermit crabs for cleanup. I have ordered larger fish (A latticed butterflyfish, coral beauty, and Powder brown Tang) but all 3 have died within 2 days. I don’t understand why. None have black or white ich, or any other marine skin condition that I could see. For food, I feed them frozen foods such as Mysis Shrimp, Mega Marine, and Algae Based marine food. Please help.

 

[NJDragonet]

Where did you buy them from those are way too sensitive for a 1 month tank I would not even add a clown

 

[NJDragonet]

Also did they have white stringy poop

 

[Reefing_addiction]

Hello I am a brand new Saltwater Hobbyist and currently have a 150 gallon FOWLR saltwater tank that has been running for a month now. I am at a loss. My tank has cycled and all the parameters are where they need to be (Salinity-1.025, 0ppm Ammonia, 8.0-PH, 0ppm Nitrite) and currently have 2 clownfish, a tiny yellow belly regal tang, 2 bengai Cardinalfish, a royal gramma, an African Red Knob Starfish, and some hermit crabs for cleanup. I have ordered larger fish (A latticed butterflyfish, coral beauty, and Powder brown Tang) but all 3 have died within 2 days. I don’t understand why. None have black or white ich, or any other marine skin condition that I could see. For food, I feed them frozen foods such as Mysis Shrimp, Mega Marine, and Algae Based marine food. Please help.

What’s the temp in your tank?
What are your nitrates at?

 

[Shayriv62]

Also did they have white stringy poop

No white stringy poop that I’ve seen. It’s confusing because all my smaller fish including the baby regal tang have survived for 3 weeks and still doing great. I bought the 2 clowns from Petco and the cardinals from my LFS. The rest are from LiveAquaria.

 

[Reefing_addiction]

Did you acclimate at all?
Do you have a qt tank set up?

 

[Shayriv62]

What’s the temp in your tank?
What are your nitrates at?

My temperature is at 74 degrees fahrenheit and nitrate levels at 5.0ppm

 

[Reefing_addiction]

Where did you get your fish from?

 

[Reefing_addiction]

My temperature is at 74 degrees fahrenheit and nitrate levels at 5.0ppm

So I would bump your temp up to 78

 

[Dolphins18]

That’s quite a lot of fish for such a young tank. Why not just hold off for a couple months, you already have way more than most would put into a tank that age.

 

[CindyKz]

Did you acclimate at all?
Do you have a qt tank set up?

Hard to say without the above information.

Did you observe them all eating?

Also, that's quite a few fish in a short amount of time. How frequently do you check ammonia levels? Did it go up after adding the most recent additions?

 

[Shayriv62]

Did you acclimate at all?
Do you have a qt tank set up?

For acclimation, I first put the bags of fish into the tank for at least 20 mins. Then I take the bags out and put the fish into the bucket so I can drip acclimate them for another hour before putting them into the tank. No I don’t have a quarantine set up. How does that work is my next question.

 

[Shayriv62]

Hard to say without the above information.

Did you observe them all eating?

Also, that's quite a few fish in a short amount of time. How frequently do you check ammonia levels? Did it go up after adding the most recent additions?

I check my ammonia levels at least 1-2 times a day. They all eat except I had problems with my butterflyfish not eating for a couple of days before he passed but also read they are picky eaters. So I changed to only feeding them frozen foods but they didn’t arrive in time before he died. The others ate fine until they passed.

 

[Shayriv62]

I check my ammonia levels at least 1-2 times a day. They all eat except I had problems with my butterflyfish not eating for a couple of days before he passed but also read they are picky eaters. So I changed to only feeding them frozen foods but they didn’t arrive in time before he died. The others ate fine until they passed.

The ammonia levels did spike a bit with the first type of food I fed them because I noticed a lot of the food would just fall to the sand and not be eaten. Once, I changed to frozen foods and cleaned the sand, the ammonia levels went down to undetectable.

 

[Shayriv62]

 

[Dolphins18]

That aquarium does not have enough live rock to provide any biological filtration at all. You need at least 175 lbs of rock for a tank that size. What other filtration are you running?
Also, where is the tang?

 

[Acros]

Fish can survive more than 2 days without eating. I wonder if there was an ammonia spike that caused the fish to die. In that case, it is suspicious that only the new fish were affected.

Do you have live sand on the bottom? Adding fish will cause ammonia spikes in never tanks more than well established tanks.

I would bump up the temp to 78.

It is weird that none of the older fish were affected by this.

 

[Shayriv62]

Tank photos

 

[Acros]

Ahh. There is no enough rock. Ammonia spike is the possible culprit.

 

[Dolphins18]

Also be sure you aren’t adding the water from the acclimation bags to your aquarium.