Clownfish seems sick

[VictoryBell]

Hello all,

I've had this particular clownfish for about a year now. 

Yesterday, I noticed she was hosting in her normal spot doing her normal weird "let myself get sucked up to the overflow so I don't have to make any effort to swim" thing. (She's taken to doing that in the last few months it's so weird.)

However, when I observed her, she seemed to be breathing really heavily near the top of the tank. Her buddy seemed ok, and the cardinal fish and tailspot blenny I keep in the tank all seemed normal. Nothing seemed off at all otherwise.

I made sure the outflow nozzles were breaking the surface of the water in case it was a gas exchange thing. (it was fine and set to create a nice ripple over the surface of the water.) I re calibrated my refractometer and checked the salinity. It was where it normally is at 1.25. I tested for nitrates and PH. PH was at 8.0.  My tank runs with higher nitrates generally and it read around 7.0 ppm when I tested. I had api test strips for ammonia (from cycling my freshwater tanks) and I dipped one of those in to test. (the test was not expired as I just bought these to monitor a new cycling fw tank about 2 months ago) It did not read ammonia. I know these aren't the best things to use but it's the only ammonia test I had. 

 

I hoped that she was just stressed out about something and would recover in a few minutes but she was like that all night and she seemed to be the same when I checked her before I left for work this morning.

 

I have not added any fish in about 9 months as it's only a 25 gallon tank and I wanted to keep my bioload to only 4 fish. The only thing I have done differently lately was added 7 coral frags that I bought at the Niagara Coral Show this past weekend. 

 

As far as her appearance, she is just breathing really heavy. She seemed a bit lighter in color, I didn't see anything else out of the ordinary like spots or marks. The tank she is in is over a year old and seems pretty stable with tons of micro fauna and such. 

 

Does anyone have any advice or thoughts on this? I'm used to clowns being a bit goofy and scaring the crap out of me with their weird behavior but my instinct tells me something is wrong.

[Humblefish]

Not saying this is definitely the cause, but corals/inverts can carry the encysted (tomont) stage of parasites e.g. ich, velvet.

 

If a tomont is on one of those corals you bought it would begin releasing free swimmers almost immediately, which in turn can infect the gills.

[VictoryBell]

Thanks for the reply. 

It's worrying that it could have come on a coral. 

So far the clownfish hasn't shown any visual signs of things like ich, velvet, etc. Her breathing seems to have slowed to back to normal and she's doing her normal hosting in the corner. However, I noticed the cardinalfish didn't eat last night and he's usually a pig. It could just me being hyper alert to anything different so I will just observe. (I don't want to put the fish through massive amounts of stress unless its necessary.)