Mysterious Killer nano

eric82

eric82

Member

A freind of mine recently started up a 13 gal nano tank with water from my established 55 gal reef. He's got around 13 lbs of pre-cured live rock in there, along with a bag of good live sand. For some reason, his tank wont hold fish. With in 2 weeks he's lost two small clowns(gold striped Maroon and false perc) three turbo snails and a coral banded shrimp. the coral banded lasted close to two days, but the clowns and the snails both died within 15 min. The clowns looked like they were trying to feed, they kept going to the surface and then started swimming upside down and bumping into stuf.The strange thing is he's had a condi in there the whole time and it seems to be doing fine. He's got good lighting, filtration, skimming. The LFS cant find anything wrong with his water...I did use the tank before him for freshwater angels, they seemed to do fine.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!!
Eric
 
babyb

babyb

Active Member
might be the salinity thats what it sounds like or it might be recycling, have you tested the water, there might have been die off from the rock and sand and caused an am. spike
i would def test the water
 
cowfishrule

cowfishrule

Active Member
sounds like the disturbance caused a re-cycle.
ah, re-reading makes me think it was the sand.
and, 2 clowns to a nano is a huge hit on the bio-load at once.
(although i dropped in 2 clowns, an rg and ywg at once)
 
eric82

eric82

Member
ahh..how long do you think it'd take for the tank to normalize from a bag of live sand?
He actually put one in at a time.
thanks!
 
perfectdark

perfectdark

Active Member
IMO It sounds like a lot of inexperience. A Condi in a 13 gal tank? A GSM clown in the same? These are creatures that should not be given such small living quaters. IMO your fish fell victim to acclimation shock. At least the ones that went in 15 minutes. As did your inverts. But testing your water chemistry would be helpful here, and post back actual numbers. Also more about the filtration, lighting, flow etc....
 
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