Need alittle help....

[devilboy]

wow, its been awhile since i have been here, looks like a buncha changes. but anyways i seem to be having alittle trouble, and no one can help me with a straight answer. here is my problem
i have one blue damsel for about 3 months now. and just out of the clear blue this bugger want to sit in my sandbed wiggle his body and fan his tail in my sandbed, causing me cloudy water. this is reoccuring constantly. what could i do? will this hurt my sandbed? or any thing else i have in my tank? and why would the bugger decide to start doing it now after 3 months? i see alot of holes and tunnels underneath my liverock, which i am sure are from him. any help would be apprciated

 

[sinner's girl]

first, need a little help isn't the best way to title a post...
second, test your water, see if anything is wrong or different.
have you added any new fish? is anyone bothering him?
I doubt this will hurt anything, the problem might be if something is already wrong.

 

[devilboy]

water params are good.... pH 8.1, dKH 8, CA 400ppm, Ammonia 0, nitrate 10ppm, nitrite 0 temp 79
no i have not added anything since i have added the damsel. i see nothing at all bothering him. i just dont like looking at a cloudy tank with sand on my corals and liverock now. i just may have to try and net him and take him back.

 

[mudplayerx]

What he is doing is natural Devilboy. All fish, especially damsels can exibit this behavior. Mine tends to do it under overhanging liverock so that he can make little tunnels for himself to swim through.
It is just one of the pains about having fish. Nothing you can do to stop it, other than getting rid of the fish or your sand. When mine does it he sometimes gets the sand on corals and liverock. I just use a toothbrush (kept especially for my tank) and brush the sand off the live rock. To get it off of the corals I wave my hand back ond forth a few times to create a small current.
ps- the cloudiness of the water should go away within a couple of minutes of you have a good flow rate.

 

[jonnywater]

I had a damsel do that in another tank. They were getting stressed due to stray voltage though (most electronics will start to admit a small amount after being run for several of months in salt water). Watching them it was not really a "consistent" movement, but more of a sporatic twitching in the sand and rubbing against rock sometimes to scrape their underbelly on the sand and get their sides all at the same time. Ground probes fixed the problem for me.
Then again maybe he is just happy that your water parameters are so good. Fish are sluggish with bad water qualities if your tank goes through a small faze. Then when it clears, the fish will "play fight" and do all sorts of weird stuff because they are happy.

 

[mudplayerx]

I think devilboy is explaining how when his damsel points his tail at the sand and whips it back and forth really quickly to dig a hole, which is natural behavior.
A grounding probe is a good idea though for your safety as well as the comfort of the fish.