Picasso Clownfish sick? HELP!

[Mr. Arbuckle]

Hello,

 

Im usually lurking around the forums and don't post much....but I'm having some issues with my tank at the moment. Yesterday I finally rid my tank of a bully fish (Lantern Basslet), and replaced him along with a shrimp/goby pair with 2 captive bred Picasso clownfish, a skunk cleaner shrimp and 2 peppermint shrimp. Everything seems to be going pretty well, aside from one of the clownfish, who seems to be pretty active and swimming, but from time to time will just go and lay on the sand bed for a bit (under a minute or so) before swimming around with his buddy again. I've attached a picture - the one with "normal" clownfish markings is the one that seems to be struggling.

 

I figure there might be some questions about my parameters and setup, so here it goes: I just checked the water parameters, and they are as follows:

 

Specific Gravity = 1.025

pH = 8.4

Ammonia = 0 ppm

Magnesium = 1380ppm

Calcium = 400ppm

Alkalinity = 11 dKH

Phosphate = 0.25ppm

Nitrate = 10ppm

 

For lighting I have a 42W LED system (Steve's LED's Biocube 14 upgrade kit), and I'm running white lights at 55% and the blue lights a little higher at 57%.

 

Temperature generally stays between 74 and 79F.

 

The rest of the setup is a Biocube 14 tank with a MJ900 (Italian made) pump, and I'm running a media basket with filter floss up top, siporax in the middle, and on the bottom I'm running activated carbon, Rowaphos, and Puirgen. 

 

Livestock includes:

1 skunk cleaner shrimp

2 peppermint shrimp

1 lettuce nudibranch 

6 nassarius snails

2 astrea snails

5 head blastomussa coral

many-headed Duncan coral

Acan coral

pulsing xenia coral

green/green-orange Zola colony

a small-ish sun coral

a galaxea coral hitchhiker (just a few polyps)

 

I've only had these two clowns in the tank for about 24 hours. During that time I also did a 25% water change, and I dosed calcium and alkalinity (which I've been doing regularly anyway). I tried feeding them earlier this morning and they seemed to be interested, and took in a few flakes but sort of spat them out.

 

Is this something to be concerned about? If so, what should I do?

 

[Clown79]

It may have an issue or it could be stress. Doing a waterchange after just being brought into a new environment can be stressful.

 

They may not like flake food. My clowns don't touch flake food. 

 

Try frozen mysis or a good pellet food.

 

The only issues I see is temp swings. Thats a big temp swing. No more than 1 degree difference. 74-79 can cause issues. 74 is pretty low temp.

 

Your phos is high.

[Mr. Arbuckle]

20 hours ago, Clown79 said:

It may have an issue or it could be stress. Doing a waterchange after just being brought into a new environment can be stressful.

 

They may not like flake food. My clowns don't touch flake food. 

 

Try frozen mysis or a good pellet food.

 

The only issues I see is temp swings. Thats a big temp swing. No more than 1 degree difference. 74-79 can cause issues. 74 is pretty low temp.

 

Your phos is high.

 

Thank you for you're response! 

 

Yeah the the food that the both of these two turned their nose up at was a high quality frozen food blend... I use "reef frenzy" by Larry's Reef Services. http://www.larrysreefservices.com/reef-frenzy.html I dropped a little in last night and they seemed to nibble on it though...made me feel better.

 

I think I got the temperature locked down now. I got it stabilized at 76.5 a couple days ago with a fan setup I rigged up, ands ice then I've slowly cranked it up to 78.1 and it hasn't fluctuated more than half a degree either direction. Phew!

 

I did another 3gal water change today - my nitrates and phosphates have been all out of whack. Also yesterday I replaced the phosban, activated carbon and purigen in my media basket - it had been a couple months since I refreshed everything in there anyway. Hopefully that will help, and hopefully won't stress the clowns.

 

[Clown79]

Carbon should be changed every 2-3 weeks or it will become an issue for nutrients, it also exhausts quickly.

 

I'm not sure about phosban, I use phosguard and change it every 2 weeks, I use very small quantities of it.

 

Purigen should be changed when it goes Brown.

 

I rinse my media bags every week.

 

Good you got the temp to 78. That's a better temp.