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?