sick yellow tang

[kevzilla]

On saturday I got a yellow tang from cowtown and I put him in a quaratine tank and he was doing very well and now today I found him laying on the ground and he was breathin funny so I put some medicine in and change the filter last night do you guys knows whats wrong???

[scary gary]

How long did you take to acclimatize the fish? What are the readings for nitrite, nitrate, ammonia, temperture? What kind of medicine? We need as much info as possible to try and figure out what happened.

[briansmyth]

If your problem is lack of oxygen, you will see the tang swim to where air bubbles are being produced or it will go to the top of the tank and appear to try to breathe air from above the waterline. If it is on the bottom or resting on rock, this may already have happened. Note - you have to be careful about raising the oxygen level too quickly - if you put the tang in a bag and aerate the bag, you may change the ph too rapidly and your tang will die from the shock.

Gary's advice is sound - check parameters - is there a big difference between the specific gravity or ph from quarantine tank to the new tank?

[kevzilla]

Well he just passed away :icon_sad: I will be doing a big water change on the quaratine tank and do a chem test on it. I just gona stick to small fish and invertebrates stuff that I can handle. I am also gona replace the filter on the 48gal tank from a aquaclear 300 to a magnum 350 morris suggested it and the aquaclear 300 will go on the quaratine tank.

[Invigor]

use the blue filters on your magnum, the micron filter is more trouble than it's worth. when I used mine, it would plug up in about a week. sometimes twice a week.. when I added the blue filter around the basket for carbon, it would polish the water just as nice, but would last much longer before plugging up. I ran the carbon basket with chemipure in it.

the tang probably passed away from starvation. from the time it was collected until you got it, it probably didn't have anything to eat..

sorry to hear, always a downer when a new fish doesn't make it.

I would also use both filters on the 48 ;) but that's just me.

[briansmyth]

Sorry to hear about your tang. It is a downer.

My yellow tang died last month, and worse, I was clearly responsible for its death. I also lost a shrimp, a bicolour angel and ten or eleven corals in a recent move from a smaller tank to a bigger one. Then I read on Canreef about someone who lost everything except for a shrimp - this was in a tank they'd had up for over two years ... didn't feel so bad about my loss after that.