Help! My fish Keep Dying!!! :(

F

Fish Outta Water

I have a 50 gallon aquarium that has been running for a little while and my fish keep dying. My nitrates, nitrites, pH, alkalinity, ammonia, phosphates, salinity, dissolved oxygen, and copper (0) are in a normal range. I bought 6 chromis, all died the next day. A couple days later I bought 3 fairly large chromis and they died a couple days apart from each other. One was doing the death spiral.
Several days later I bought Rolland's (?) damsel who had been at a fish store for 3 months so I know he was a healthy fish. I put him in the aquarium aclimated him for an hour and a half on Tuesday and he was dead today. I have about 17 lbs of live rock in my aquarium.
For the most part all my invertabrates are doing fine. 2 sand sifting snails, 1 chocolate startfish, sea urchin, 5 blue legged hermit crabs, 3 red legged hermit crabs, and a peppermint shrimp.

I am at a loss of what to do. I have a very limited budget because I'm a school teacher, at Saginaw High School, and the money I have is money that my students have fundraised for.

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.
 
I float the bag and ever so often I add a little cup of my water. (I don't have a refrugium to drip acclimate. (I've never had problems with this procedure in the past. My aquarium at home has a 6 line wrasse and a watchman gobie.) I do this for awhile and then I take a little cup of the bag water out and then put my tank water in. All this takes place over a span of an hour to an hour and a half.

My temp. ranges from 76 to 78. My salinity is 1.022. I can't remember what my pH was I just know when I had it tested they said is was good. I know that doesn't explain a lot. I can test it later on today.

My peppermint shrimp looks bleached out and now keeps jumping into the filter.
 
Oh and yes I'm stupid and used tap water. The directions with the tank call for it. It was dechlorinated and the tank was cycling awhile before I added anything.
 
By your response you obviously know you shouldn't be using tap water, but I have never heard of it killing fish it if has been properly treated. What do you use? Not sure about Fort Worth, but Carrollton uses chloramine, which takes longer to break down and when it does it release chlorine and ammonia.

I use RO/DI and still add Prime just in case...

Mitch
 
Oh sorry for the confusion, my six line is not in that same aquarium.

There are zero alive fish in my aquarium at school. All of them acted fine but a little skittish at first. Hiding in the rocks. The spiral was like he was spinning upside down and looked like he was struggling to breathe. He's the only one I actually witnessed die. My LFS said it sounded like that Chromis had a bacterial infection. All of them stayed among the rocks. The damsel seemed completely fine yesterday. When I fed he came out and was eating very regularly. I was feeding them mysis.
Upon closer inspection my sea cucumber looks like his skin is peeling, but where it has come off it looks like "healthy skin". I don't know exactly what type he is except he looks like a fuzzy pickle and he is a sand sifter.
 
I'm sorry for your losses!!!

Have you ever checked the salinity of the bag water? Rapid increases in salinity is deadly to fish, and fish need to be acclimated very slowly to higher SG concentrations, in the order of 0.001-0.002 SG per day. A couple LFSes in the Dallas area keep their tanks at 1.015-1.017, and if your LFS was similar, going from that to the 1.022 water in your tank in 1.5 hours is way too quick. This would stress your fish to death within a matter of hours to a day or two.
 
@joelq wrote:
I'm sorry for your losses!!! Have you ever checked the salinity of the bag water? Rapid increases in salinity is deadly to fish said:
So would they still be stressed out 7 days later and then die? That's how long my damsel lived. :( I'm just so confused over this whole thing.

Could it be my sand? It was donated to my school from an older aquarium. We washed the sand really well before placing it in the aquarium. I'm just grasping at straws here.
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H hate to be the one that suggests this but it almost sounds as if you have marine velvet in your tank. This is probably one of the fastest killers in our hobby. It will wipe a tank out in less than a week. As Im on the road I can't pull any links right now but maybe someone can help out in that aspect, or just Google it. I honestly hope I'm wrong but this is what it sounds like to me.

Sent from my MyTouch4g
 
@Matt wrote:
[I]@Fish Outta Water wrote:[/I][quote="[I]@Matt wrote:[/I][quote="If you have a parasite such as Crypto or worse I would leave the tank fallow (fishless) for a minimum of 6 weeks said:
Is there a test for that?"]

No but your fish would exhibit visual signs of infestation such as spots, scratching against the rocks, etc. I can't say with any certainty what is going on in your tank. I would definitely get away from using tap water and strive to use RODI water. I'd also recommend leaving the tank fallow for 6-8 weeks to rule out any sort of parasite. Leaving the tank fallow should starve out a fish specific parasite."]


The Chromis I actually witness die I noticed that it looked like it had dark blueish spots under it's skin. I've been using deionized water to top off evaporation. And no I won't be using tap anymore.

If I take some of my invertabrates home, do I need to worry about infecting my fish?
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If there are corals in the tank it will not affect them either. But as Matt stated leaving the tank fallow for 8 weeks is the only GUARANTEED fix for marine velvet as it has been proven to survive in hyposalinity and even high temps.
 
Do you have any other kind of filtration on the tank? 17 lbs of live rock isn't going to provide much space for denitrifying bacteria in a 50 gallon tank, and adding more than one fish at a time is going to spike the ammonia level. Even if the ammonia is down by the time you test it, the spike is still going to hurt the fish.
 
Yes I also have bio balls (if that's what they are called), with a bag of carbon on top of them, and a protein skimmer.


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