Marks on clownfish

Furze · Oct 22, 2022

Hi everyone.

A week ago I noticed a black circle on my female clownfishes head.

I looked up fish diseases and dismissed it as a bta sting.
However today I have noticed the circle has disappeared but there is now discolouration on the side of this clownfish.

I have attached a few more examples.

this is the only fish showing any signs of anything. Have had no corals or fish added in 2 months. The clownfish is still eating and hosting with normal behaviour.

As the pair of clowns are small (born March) they live in a large acclimation box, with a couple of BTA’s. Other tank inhabitants aren’t able to get in the box but include a number of wrasses, a copperband butterfly and a lemon peel mimic tang.

tank parameters:

ammonia: 0
Nitrate: 12
Phosphate: 0.09
Temp: 25.5c-25.7 (controlled by apex)
Salinity: 36ppt
Ph: swings from 8.1 to 8.3 daily

other notable things:

* 2 nights ago our pump broke in the middle of the night, ph rose to 8.5, and temp dropped to 22.3c, and all flow was stopped for ~ 5 hours

* last night either our heaters or our apex messed up and the tank dropped to 24.3c. Have replaced both heaters today.

* The clowns are moved to a clean acclimation box weekly during water change, and were netted out today.

Jay Hemdal · Oct 22, 2022

Hello,

I see two primary possibilities here - first; acclimation boxes can cause injury to fish due to the sharp edges in the slots. It may be that the clownfish have become more active and perhaps are fighting a bit, causing it to rub in the slots. The other possibility is an unknown skin discoloration seen in white clownfish. I discuss that here, but so far, nobody knows what the cause is:

Clownfish bruising/lesion?

All, Over the past two years or so, I've come across dozens of cases on the fish disease forum here of an issue with clownfish that we have not been able to identify. I've never seen it on any clownfish I've had myself, but the issue seems most common on designer clowns, which I don't work...

www.reef2reef.com