I forgot to mention I saw white poop hanging off of him a few days to a week ago, but didn’t personally see any again. I currently do not have a quarantine tank fully set up. I would need to do something in my current tank which features another ocellaris clownfish, and an astraea snail.
Also, FYI using #fishmedic will notify the fish medics on here to your post. There is a sticky thread in the fish treatment and diagnosis forum which provides some info on how to alert them and what information they generally need to help you out. The red line does look like some internal organ/structure which may be seen from being too thin or may be seen in some juvenile fish which are more translucent. I am not experienced enough to grade this guys body score, to know whether he is malnourished or not but the fish experts should be here soon now.
White stringy poop can be an indication of internal parasites. Here is a good link to some common and not so common fish diseases, this is usually where I go first when I suspect something is off with one of my fish. (https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/fish-diseases-101.189284/)
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About last week I saw a stringy white poop but I haven’t personally seen any poop since. I feed them New Life Spectrum 1mm pellets (6-8 a day) and 3 times a week I soak freeze dried brine shrimp and then feed them it.
The hunch on diet may be part of issue.
From the video it is a bit thin. You should first try feeding more food, more often. It is entirely possible that it’s caloric intake just isn’t enough for it to put on weight. If it is eating all its food, feed it more until it just stops feeding….
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My tank is 10 gallons (eventually to be upgraded to 20/30). I have just fish with live rock and a snail, and my tank has been established for about a month. My salinity is at 1.022, my temperature is 80, my ammonia and nitrites is at 0, my nitrates are at 5/10. My ph is at 8 but I want to bring it up a bit. I went to my lfs store to get my phosphates tested and forgot to ask the exact measurement but they said it was about perfect I think. I have tried feeding the fish a lot more but am scared of over feeding it, and my other clownfish seems to be unaffected. Pictures and videos are in the first post. I am planning to try some diversity with other foods as well as somebody already told me to try. Also I have seen white stringy poop once but havn’t seen any poop since. I do not have a QT fully cycled right now so I would need something I can do in my current tank. #fishmedic
Thanks - I would watch - I do not think dietary issues or anything else 'common' would cause a 'red line'. It could be breeding colors, etc. I would recommend you use excellent parameter control and excellent feeding. etc . I would not worry about a disease.
When you mentioned red line did you mean this?
When he does fill out more, do I keep feeding until he stops eating or do I go to smaller feedings?When you mentioned red line did you mean this?
If so, thats just the spine and ribs of the fish, what is making it look red is probably the kidney which runs along the spine. In a healthy juvenile fish when they are more transparent this is easy to see and usually gets more difficult to see as they grow larger and have more vibrant color. From your video your clown is on the thinner side in the video and it also looks like the smaller of the two clowns, is that right?
For reference your clown is on the left and mine is on the right. Might be hard to tell but if you look at the chest near the pectoral fins, yours has pectoral fins closer to each other and the one on the right are a farther apart, and you can kind of tell that the belly on the right is larger than on the left.
Now I'm not saying he is emaciated or anything but if he is the smaller of the too, he might just be less dominant and might not be getting as much food as the other clown. These observations along with the fact that he has had some white stringy poop, I think it is reasonable to assume that he would benefit from some more nutrition. Either thats because he is not eating enough or because he has some internal parasites. I am not the expert on fish disease treatment so I will not recommend anything for that, but if it were me I would try feeding a lot more. Don't be afraid of overfeeding, be more afraid of underfeeding. Worrying about nitrate levels is mostly for those keeping corals, you are likely to have an outbreak of algae before your nitrates get so high there is concern for the fish. Frozen foods are much less nutrient dense than pellets and take a lot of it to "overfeed", I would try to get some hikari mysis shrimp and broadcast feed the tank. If both clowns seem to be eating the same amount and not competing for the food, yet one is thinner than the other (not smaller but thinner), I would suspect the thinner fish is suffering from some disease. It is the only explanation for one fish to not maintain a healthy weight when being fed the same amount of calories as another fish that is maintaining a healthy weight.
I agree with @Jay Hemdal and @vetteguy53081, feed until they stop wanting to eat. If you worry about overfeeding, then look for frozen foods (not freeze dried, frozen holds more nutrients). Mine are still pretty young and prefer hikari mysis, they seem to be a better size for them than the PE mysis which is a bit larger. Long term a varied diet is best for any fish, since this more replicates them in the wild. Even if you don't do any treatments right now, I think its better to try and intervene now with increasing dietary intake as this is a pretty benign solution and it will either help or won't make any difference in the fish but definitely won't hurt them.
Last thought, I'm not sure if 1.022 is low enough to mask any fish disease but I know @Jay Hemdal has mentioned that hypo salinity long-term in a FOWLR tank is not recommended. Maybe he can comment on this, because it might be if you raise salinity to 1.025-1.026 which is the recommended range to replicate the salinity of the ocean then any fish disease may become more evident. Supposedly this is why fish appear healthy in fish stores because a lot of them keep their fish in lower salinity water to cut on salt costs but it masks diseases present.
I would try to keep track of the amount that you feed and then just continue feeding that amount. I have an automatic feeding station that puts out some pellets into a feeding ring 3 times a day and then every evening I broadcast feed some kind of frozen food. I currently have the blister packs but am thinking about making my own frozen mixture to save on money and provide more variety daily. Frozen food I have now is Hikari mysis shrimp which are smaller and preferred by my clowns, Hikari mysis with spirulina, PE mysis which my serpent starfish likes and anemone, and also PE calanus which my clowns also like. You don't have to do the frozen every day but a couple times a week is probably good for longterm health. I'm not sure how many fish we see in the hobby become obese from eating too much so its probably better to just keep feeding until he stops eating but once you know about how much that is you can just dump in however much that typically is and even if he doesn't eat it all it shouldn't be that big of an issue in your tank as far as added nutrients.
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