Tropic Isle Clownfish died

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

I bought a bunch of fish from Tropic isle a few weeks ago. The yellow tang and a big school of chromis are all fine (1 of 15 chromis disappeared the first night, but that's a good ratio, IMO, and they even gave me one extra in advance for that reason), but all three juvenile ocellaris clowns died within 10 days. The began breathing rapidly, became listless, stopped eating, and eventually died. Two were being treated with copper, but still showed no improvement.

So be wary of juvenile clowns from them.

 

[MofoCorals]

How many fish did you introduce into you tank at once? What size tank do you have? It sounds like the clown fish died from ammonia. 19 fish at once could have started the cycle all over in your tank. Check you ammonia, nitrite, nitrate...

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

Thanks for the suggestion, but I do not think it was ammonia. It is a big, established system (few hundred gallons with several hundred pounds of live rock that's been in the system for 3-15 years), and other clowns in other parts of the system were fine. All of the added fish were quite small.

 

[saltwaterB]

I feel that copper can definitely kill small tank raised Clowns (IME) they can be very sensitive to copper.

It really will come down to source. Over the last few years TR Clownfish have gone down in quality in a major way. Not really sure why,and I have tried them from tons of different sources. Maybe it is that so many breeding facilities are watering down their gene pool and turning broodstock enough??? who knows, but I feel it is the source that is really the problem (I am not sure where Tropic Isle gets there Clown Fish from, so i can not comment on their particular source, just that as an industry as a whole)

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

It is certainly possible that the copper did not help, and may have hurt. They were in the display for a while until they began to show the stated symptoms, and were then moved to a hospital tank where I treated with copper (Cupramine), thinking they may have had Amyloodinium ocellatum. While they had no visible symptoms, all of the behaviours are detailed in Joyce Wilkerson's clownfish book as being potentially caused by Amyloodinium ocellatum, although I do not know what the actual problem was. The symptoms are pretty generic, and fit many things (including ammonia, as suggested above), and many would not be helped by copper.

FWIW, one only went into a QT tank, but never got copper. It was the first to show symptoms in the display, and died in a QT tank before copper was added. So copper alone was not the only problem.