Help me figure out why my clown died!

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Apwhite

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Iā€™ve kept various freshwater fish over the years but I just recently started my first saltwater tank. Itā€™s a 10g and I cycled it for several weeks with the help of tetra safe start plus. My aquarium has been fully cycled for about a week now, but I waited to put a fish into it until yesterday just in case. Yesterday I bought my fishā€”an ocellaris clown. A little baby from petco. I brought him home and drip acclimated him to my tank. After a little over an hour, I added him to the tank and he seemed to be having a blast! He explored all the little corners of the tank and enjoyed swimming around in his new home. I have a fake anemone in the tank, and it was so sweet to watch him play with it and eventually go to sleep in it. This morning I woke up and he is dead. Iā€™m absolutely heartbroken and have no idea what happened. My water parameters were perfect according to my research. No ammonia or nitrite and about 15ppm nitrate (I read this was okay but now Iā€™m questioning it). Ph 8.2. Salinity 0.023. Temperature 78-80 degrees Fahrenheit. RO water. He didnā€™t seem sad in the tank. Like I said he seemed very healthy and wasnā€™t moping around somewhere or anything. It didnā€™t look like was was struggling for air or anything either. I am so confused and heartbroken. I have no idea what happened. I want to get another fish soon, but Iā€™m terrified. Is there something wrong with my tank? Or was it the fish? I am calling petco later today to ask some questions, but I wanted to know what use guys think. After I found him this morning I tested the water again. There was 0.25ppm nitrite. Iā€™m wondering if this was enough to hurt him? He didnā€™t have red gills or anything though. Otherwise I have no idea what happened. Please help!!!
 
Iā€™ve kept various freshwater fish over the years but I just recently started my first saltwater tank. Itā€™s a 10g and I cycled it for several weeks with the help of tetra safe start plus. My aquarium has been fully cycled for about a week now, but I waited to put a fish into it until yesterday just in case. Yesterday I bought my fishā€”an ocellaris clown. A little baby from petco. I brought him home and drip acclimated him to my tank. After a little over an hour, I added him to the tank and he seemed to be having a blast! He explored all the little corners of the tank and enjoyed swimming around in his new home. I have a fake anemone in the tank, and it was so sweet to watch him play with it and eventually go to sleep in it. This morning I woke up and he is dead. Iā€™m absolutely heartbroken and have no idea what happened. My water parameters were perfect according to my research. No ammonia or nitrite and about 15ppm nitrate (I read this was okay but now Iā€™m questioning it). Ph 8.2. Salinity 0.023. Temperature 78-80 degrees Fahrenheit. RO water. He didnā€™t seem sad in the tank. Like I said he seemed very healthy and wasnā€™t moping around somewhere or anything. It didnā€™t look like was was struggling for air or anything either. I am so confused and heartbroken. I have no idea what happened. I want to get another fish soon, but Iā€™m terrified. Is there something wrong with my tank? Or was it the fish? I am calling petco later today to ask some questions, but I wanted to know what use guys think. After I found him this morning I tested the water again. There was 0.25ppm nitrite. Iā€™m wondering if this was enough to hurt him? He didnā€™t have red gills or anything though. Otherwise I have no idea what happened. Please help!!!
I'm not saying this in a mean way or doubting your knowledge so please take this as a kind question and not as an imsulting one... Did you do your research for your tank? How much did you know about saltwater tanks to start one? Just so you know, I have no experience with salt water but from what I have heard you cant just add salt to a tank and call it a saltwater tank... I know @PheonixKingZ has started a saltwater tank that has been thriving. Maybe he can shed some light on this
 
Iā€™ve kept various freshwater fish over the years but I just recently started my first saltwater tank. Itā€™s a 10g and I cycled it for several weeks with the help of tetra safe start plus. My aquarium has been fully cycled for about a week now, but I waited to put a fish into it until yesterday just in case. Yesterday I bought my fishā€”an ocellaris clown. A little baby from petco. I brought him home and drip acclimated him to my tank. After a little over an hour, I added him to the tank and he seemed to be having a blast! He explored all the little corners of the tank and enjoyed swimming around in his new home. I have a fake anemone in the tank, and it was so sweet to watch him play with it and eventually go to sleep in it. This morning I woke up and he is dead. Iā€™m absolutely heartbroken and have no idea what happened. My water parameters were perfect according to my research. No ammonia or nitrite and about 15ppm nitrate (I read this was okay but now Iā€™m questioning it). Ph 8.2. Salinity 0.023. Temperature 78-80 degrees Fahrenheit. RO water. He didnā€™t seem sad in the tank. Like I said he seemed very healthy and wasnā€™t moping around somewhere or anything. It didnā€™t look like was was struggling for air or anything either. I am so confused and heartbroken. I have no idea what happened. I want to get another fish soon, but Iā€™m terrified. Is there something wrong with my tank? Or was it the fish? I am calling petco later today to ask some questions, but I wanted to know what use guys think. After I found him this morning I tested the water again. There was 0.25ppm nitrite. Iā€™m wondering if this was enough to hurt him? He didnā€™t have red gills or anything though. Otherwise I have no idea what happened. Please help!!!
You messed up any cycle you had already started, with the Safe Start +. As it says on the bottle, itā€™s meant for freshwater tanks only.

Your 0.023ppm certainly didnā€™t kill him, but thatā€™s the bare minimum it should be at. I prefer to keep my tank at 0.025ppm, and it works great for my clowns and my coral.

The 0.25ppm nitrite is concerning, as it should be 0ppm. My guess is that the tests showed your tank was cycled, but it was just a ā€œquick cycleā€. That is when the test may show perfect results, but it can change the next day without warning. That is why it is recommended to cycle for over a month, to make sure everything is steady.

Did you cycle the tank with live rock? What filter did you have? What test kit did you use?

I am calling petco later today to ask some questions, but I wanted to know what use guys think.
Iā€™m not sure if their 30 day money back guarantee works for saltwater fish, but you will just have to ask. I know they used to have a policy for freshwater fish.
 
Do you have any other animals in the tank, like hermit crabs or snails? If so, those are a useful indicator of tank health, particularly from the standpoint of water conditions and conditions that might kill livestock quickly. If a fish dies right away around invertebrates that have been doing just fine, it usually isn't the tank water that's the issue.

What's your filtration on this tank and how long was the fish in the tank before you found it dead? If only a day then it could be very hard to tell what happened. Nitrates are a bit high but not high enough to be a smoking gun to me. The increase after the fish died could be due to the fish death - something dying in a marine tank starts spiking waste pretty fast, particularly if the filtration is minimal and new, although typically I would expect an ammonia spike rather than nitrate from the cycle was having issues.

One thing to be aware of with marine animals is that mysterious deaths with new livestock are sadly not that unusual. For example, a fish can have an illness or be on the brink of starvation when it reaches a home aquarium (often indicated by a stomach area that looks concave but it's harder to see in some fish than others) and the stress of being moved can be enough to push it over the edge. Things like that are why marine livestock almost never has any guarantees after sale. Without having seen a picture of the clown alive and swimming it's hard to know if there was anything wrong with the fish when you got it.

The 0.25ppm nitrite is concerning, as it should be 0ppm.
Many healthy FOWLRs do not run at 0ppm nitrate, particularly early on. Getting it closer to 0 is more important down the line for reef tanks with certain types of corals and for avoiding algal issues, but this tank doesn't sound like a reef from the description. Generally I would say that 0ppm is an unrealistic expectation for a new, 10 gallon setup.
 
I'm not saying this in a mean way or doubting your knowledge so please take this as a kind question and not as an imsulting one... Did you do your research for your tank? How much did you know about saltwater tanks to start one? Just so you know, I have no experience with salt water but from what I have heard you cant just add salt to a tank and call it a saltwater tank... I know @PheonixKingZ has started a saltwater tank that has been thriving. Maybe he can shed some light on this
At this point Iā€™d consider myself pretty well read on saltwater as well as the differences between saltwater and freshwater tanks. I didnā€™t buy or add water to or start cycling my tank until I felt confident in my knowledge. Throughout the setup process, I tested the water frequently for all the necessary parameters. This is a huge contributor as to why Iā€™m so confused right now, because I thought that everything was just right. I read somewhere that if a fish has a parasite or something then the new environment will make things go over the top? Iā€™m just so confused right now and Iā€™m trying to figure out what I need to fix
 
You messed up any cycle you had already started, with the Safe Start +. As it says on the bottle, itā€™s meant for freshwater tanks only.

Your 0.023ppm certainly didnā€™t kill him, but thatā€™s the bare minimum it should be at. I prefer to keep my tank at 0.025ppm, and it works great for my clowns and my coral.

The 0.25ppm nitrite is concerning, as it should be 0ppm. My guess is that the tests showed your tank was cycled, but it was just a ā€œquick cycleā€. That is when the test may show perfect results, but it can change the next day without warning. That is why it is recommended to cycle for over a month, to make sure everything is steady.

Did you cycle the tank with live rock? What filter did you have? What test kit did you use?


Iā€™m not sure if their 30 day money back guarantee works for saltwater fish, but you will just have to ask. I know they used to have a policy for freshwater fish.
Oh no!! I canā€™t believe I missed that about safe start! I feel so dumb! I added the entire 3.38oz bottle at the beginning of cycling my 10g and did a 1/3 water change the day before adding the fish. So safe start is toxic to saltwater fish? Do you think thatā€™s what my problem was? Or do you think that was only a contributor? As for the salinity, Iā€™m a bit confused about what you said about 0.023 being low. The employee at petco said that they keep their tanks around 0.021-22 so now Iā€™m a bit confused. I used live sand but not live rock. My test kit is the api saltwater liquid test kit
 
Do you have any other animals in the tank, like hermit crabs or snails? If so, those are a useful indicator of tank health, particularly from the standpoint of water conditions and conditions that might kill livestock quickly. If a fish dies right away around invertebrates that have been doing just fine, it usually isn't the tank water that's the issue.

What's your filtration on this tank and how long was the fish in the tank before you found it dead? If only a day then it could be very hard to tell what happened. Nitrates are a bit high but not high enough to be a smoking gun to me. The increase after the fish died could be due to the fish death - something dying in a marine tank starts spiking waste pretty fast, particularly if the filtration is minimal and new, although typically I would expect an ammonia spike rather than nitrate from the cycle was having issues.

One thing to be aware of with marine animals is that mysterious deaths with new livestock are sadly not that unusual. For example, a fish can have an illness or be on the brink of starvation when it reaches a home aquarium (often indicated by a stomach area that looks concave but it's harder to see in some fish than others) and the stress of being moved can be enough to push it over the edge. Things like that are why marine livestock almost never has any guarantees after sale. Without having seen a picture of the clown alive and swimming it's hard to know if there was anything wrong with the fish when you got it.


Many healthy FOWLRs do not run at 0ppm nitrate, particularly early on. Getting it closer to 0 is more important down the line for reef tanks with certain types of corals and for avoiding algal issues, but this tank doesn't sound like a reef from the description. Generally I would say that 0ppm is an unrealistic expectation for a new, 10 gallon setup.
I did not have any other animals in the tank. I was planning on getting a little shrimp soon though. Do you think that in the future I should add a shrimp or something before the actual fish? My filtration in the tank is a 90gph filter from petsmart. I canā€™t say how long the fish was in the tank because it died sometime in the night. I put it in the tank around 4pm, and I went to bed around 11-11:30pm (he still seemed fine at that point). I got up around 9:30, where I found him at the bottom of the tank. I had another user point out to me that tetra safe start (which I used at the beginning of the cycle) is for freshwater only! I canā€™t believe I missed that bit of info and I was wondering if you think that was the issue? I did a 1/3 water change the day before adding the fish so it probably wasnā€™t as concentrated as it was before but still. Also, if safe start was the problem, how should I fix that? Would I have to do a 100% water change?
 
I did not have any other animals in the tank. I was planning on getting a little shrimp soon though. Do you think that in the future I should add a shrimp or something before the actual fish? My filtration in the tank is a 90gph filter from petsmart. I canā€™t say how long the fish was in the tank because it died sometime in the night. I put it in the tank around 4pm, and I went to bed around 11-11:30pm (he still seemed fine at that point). I got up around 9:30, where I found him at the bottom of the tank. I had another user point out to me that tetra safe start (which I used at the beginning of the cycle) is for freshwater only! I canā€™t believe I missed that bit of info and I was wondering if you think that was the issue? I did a 1/3 water change the day before adding the fish so it probably wasnā€™t as concentrated as it was before but still. Also, if safe start was the problem, how should I fix that? Would I have to do a 100% water change?

If the 90gph filter is the only thing in your tank counting as bio filtration, I would read up on using live rock as filtration since it sounds like you don't have any of that in your tank. Live rock provides an almost ready-to-go bio filter and far more bio-filtering capacity than you get with a standard fw-style filter, which is what it sounds like you're using. Definitely don't add shrimp to a tank done with fw-style filtration - I would never put inverts in a tank that didn't have live rock in it unless it was for quarantine purposes. With the exception of some very special kinds of expert-only (for things like breeding marine fish), the average marine tank needs to be managed like an ecosystem to be stable and isn't simply a matter of having a filter on a tank. You can do a full water change if you want, but if you aren't reading ammonia/nitrite I would still just get live rock as your filtration base and maybe run a bit of carbon while the rock mini-cycles if you're worried.

That said, I don't believe anything filtration-related killed the fish if it was literally just hours spent in your tank, particularly if you weren't reading ammonia or nitrite just prior. Healthy fish can be kept in a bucket with just an air pump for that length of time. If you had no ammonia or nitrite and only saw nitrate, you either have a cycle going one way or another or you have a bad test kit or kits for ammonia/nitrite - best to get that confirmed at the store if they offer saltwater testing just to be sure. If you get it checked somewhere and it suddenly reads high ammonia/nitrite in particular, then that changes the diagnosis to more likely being water issues, but otherwise I would still suspect an unhealthy fish even though the setup wasn't suitable for it long-term.
 
Many healthy FOWLRs do not run at 0ppm nitrate,
I concur that many FOWLRā€™s do not run at 0ppm nitrate, but thatā€™s not what I or the OP said.

0.25ppm nitrite
The 0.25ppm nitrite is concerning, as it should be 0ppm.


ā€”ā€”-

As for the salinity, Iā€™m a bit confused about what you said about 0.023 being low. The employee at petco said that they keep their tanks around 0.021-22 so now Iā€™m a bit confused.
PetCo employees have no clue what they are talking about. The ideal range for saltwater tanks, is 0.023ppm - 0.028ppm. In the future, donā€™t trust the employees.

So safe start is toxic to saltwater fish? Do you think thatā€™s what my problem was? Or do you think that was only a contributor?
I donā€™t think it was the main thing that killed him, but it might have been a contributing factor.

I think you had unsteady parameters and that a spike in nitrite killed him. Itā€™s also possible he had a prior disease, and because heā€™s still a baby, heā€™s just super sensitive.
 
Apologies, I did misread nitrite as nitrate because I missed the leading dot. Having nitrate present does mean the cycle is incomplete. Still recommend the live rock route for going forward but do also really doubt the low nitrite reading would kill within mere hours. (Sorry for brevity, typing on phone atm)
 
Ugh either I can't type on my phone or autocorrect is getting me. Having NitrIte with an "ite" means messed up cycle. Can't seem to edit my previous post.
 
Ugh either I can't type on my phone or autocorrect is getting me. Having NitrIte with an "ite" means messed up cycle. Can't seem to edit my previous post.
Thank you so much for all the help! I will try to obtain some live rock as well as continue my cycle. Hopefully I will have a healthy clown someday!
 
I read somewhere that if a fish has a parasite or something then the new environment will make things go over the top? Iā€™m just so confused right now and Iā€™m trying to figure out what I need to fix
If a fish has a disease, it will usually show up as unusual colouration or patches on the fish. Most diseases take more than a few hours to kill the fish. Things like white spot take a few weeks to build up in numbers and kill the fish. Brooklynella is an external protozoan parasite that can kill fish in a few days but it appears as cream or white patches over the body. Unless the fish had a severe case when you got it, that is unlikely to be the issue.

Various bacteria can kill fish pretty quickly but normally need a few days to kill them, and they show up as red areas on the fish.

A low level of nitrite (0.25ppm) should not have killed the fish and might have been caused by the dead fish if you did the test after the fish had died. If the fish was very young and not in the best condition, then being caught, bagged up and put in a tank with a low nitrite level might have been too much for it.

The pH and salinity are fine.

The temperature could come down a couple of degrees. Most tropical marine fishes do best in water with a temp around 24-25C (75-77F).

If you lose a fish, take pictures of it in the water and post them, it might show something.
 
Thank you so much for all the help! I will try to obtain some live rock as well as continue my cycle. Hopefully I will have a healthy clown someday!
Just keep at it. :) Try to get a complete cycle this time around and make sure parameters are consistent for a week before adding any more clowns.

This time when you look for a clownfish, make sure itā€™s an older specimen. Ask try looking for a fish outside of PetCo, as they are usually MUCH healthier in smaller shops. (Local fish stores)
 
Just keep at it. :) Try to get a complete cycle this time around and make sure parameters are consistent for a week before adding any more clowns.

This time when you look for a clownfish, make sure itā€™s an older specimen. Ask try looking for a fish outside of PetCo, as they are usually MUCH healthier in smaller shops. (Local fish stores)
Again thanks so much! When you say to look for an older specimen, is this because they are more hardy when theyā€™re a bit older? Unfortunately petco is the closest shop to my house, though there is a petsmart beyond that. Though Iā€™m assuming petsmart has the same disadvantages that petco hasšŸ˜¬ thank youuuuu!!
 

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