What kills fish but not inverts within 24hrs?

Joined
21 May 2014
Posts
118
Reaction score
10
Location
Cape Town
For full details on the setup of my tank ----> First reef tank of a very paranoid person - Marine Aquariums South Africa

After having shrimp, corals, snails and hermits in the tank for a week I decided it was time for my first fish. I bought two firefish last week friday, a red and a purple, sadly the bug bit me badly, bought a purple dottyback the sunday. I'm goint to be honest I didn't listen to the people smarter than me so I bought two true percs on monday.

Drip aclimated all the fish, few sparringly, everybody seemed to be doing great.

Thinking I was doing a good thing on tuesday evening I fed them thawed food with Aquazole, like I would with new freshwater or brackishfish. (Very stupid I know that now). Everybody loved the food, afterwards the clowns were chasing the dottyback, the firefish were hovering around, all normal.

Next morning before work I went to switch on the lights and found my hermit munching on the one clownfish. All my fish were dead :m24: :m24: :m24:
Yet my all my shrimps were happy, even the cleaner with the massive parasite who molted two days ago was looking chill!

Took water to be tested, pH was a bit low at 8, Ammonia was less than 0.25, otherwise all paramaters were normal. I have been dosing special blend every 3rd day.

Now please tell me. How did I kill my fish without killing my inverts? Did I make the most noobish mistake by adding too many fish within too short a period? What happened? And how can I prevent it from happening again?

Thanks everyone.
 
Hi,

looking at that i would think ammonia spike from adding to many fish at once.
 
to prevent this here is what i do

when i add a new fish or fishes, i test ammonia the next day, if i dont get a 0 reading i know i have to increase my biological filtration and dose extra bacteria for a few days to allow the system to adjust and catch up to the new bio-load
 
simple question maybe. could the ammonia not have spiked(raised) due to the fish dying in the night and water only being tested some time later?
 
strangely not , ive recently had shrimps go through the curing process of live rock ...

lol, they are weak with salinity changes but can survive a cycling process :m12:
Thanks for the info!
 
Certain shrimp are indestructible. I reckon coral bandits could probably live in the toilet if they needed to.
But short answer to many fish to soon. Patience is the name of the game.
 
An interesting notion I've come across is perhaps something happened to the O2? And that is why the inverts were not affected because they don't use a lot of oxygen.
 
Back
Top Bottom