Hip`po Tang (Dory) swimming near the water surface.
My hippo tang was swimming very hard on the water surface of my tank (60 gal.) and was (now dead) hyper ventilating. Mouth and eyeballs would sometimes go above the water surface. I moved it to an isolated gold fish bowl with the same tank water noticed the same issue, put it back to the main tank (same thing), so I took it out and put it back in the goldfish bowl because if it would die there I would not have to worry about looking for it later and its rotting corpse would also affect my water as well. 6 hours later it died.
Its stomach has been a little bony looking. I do leave nori seaweed for 5 hours in the tank at least and I mix up the food from bitty pellets one day and flakes another. Feeding is once a day around 7:00pm because that is when my lights turn on. It does feed here and there, just not as fast to the punch like the other fishes when food is placed in the water.
Had the hippo tang for 2 weeks now. Other fishes seems to be okay.
Phos: around 0.25 and Nitrate a little under 25ppm Salinity @ 1.027
Water activity during that night the hippo tang was having issues:
1. Fish feeding with seaweed on veggie clip.
2. Threw in a half a block of freeze dried brine shrimp for the anemone some of it did get away around the tank though.
3. Fed corals reefroids and some of that got is swimming around the tank as well.
Any ideas why it did what it did? And future preventive measures I can take when a fish does look stressed or having trouble breathing?
Hip`po Tang (Dory) swimming near the water surface.
The angel and clowns are definitely aggressive fish and can be jerks to any newcomers poking around their reef. Unfortunately, the only place the new fish can escape to is the surface. Usually with clowns and angels, they’ll do their little “poof up and body shake” next to the new fish to say “Look how dominant I am” for a few days and that’s it. Pecking order established and all is well. But in other cases that show of dominance doesn’t stop and the new fish is literally stressed to death. So what can you do? When I add fish, I acclimate as normal, put them in a little plastic critter container (a few bucks at petsmart) filled with various rock & pvc tube and place it on the bottom of the tank for a few days. I sneakily feed the new fish via pipet through the slats in the lid. The dominant fish are half intimidated by the plastic construct in the tank and half agitated by the new fish which keeps them away from the container but allows them to get used to the new fish while the new fish settles in a bit. If I don’t see aggressive shaking after a few days, I feed the tank and release the new fish into the display after everyone is done eating and while the existing tribe is so full that they really don’t want to do anything about the new fish.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk