Powder Blue Tang Sick?

[tsharkey]

I just added some tangs last week into my tank. They were all doing great. They were all eating and their colors were great! However, two of the three of them had ich which was no longer present on them after 48 hours which was a blessing! Their health skyrocketed and was impressed. When I checked in the tank this morning everything was fine and everything ate as always. When I got home however, my powder blue tang was breathing heavily and swimming slow. A few minutes later he was laying on his side. He just laid there for several minutes. His color looks great but he won't eat. He will swim around slowly every now and then though and he goes back to lay down. He is still breathing fast and heavy. What is wrong with him? Any thoughts on what I can do? My tank is a 210 gallon reef. All parameters are as they should be. Salinity is 1.024. Temperature is 80 degrees. All photos are from a few seconds ago. Please help!

 

[TheTodd]

What are your parameters? Possible spike due to BB overload? How many fish did you add?

Also, Ich does not just disappear (like a miracle cure, but does as part of its life cycle) and likes to get into gils. Maybe gil damage from that?

 

[tsharkey]

It is dead now. But my parameters are:

Ammonia:0
Phosphate:0
Nitrite:0
Nitrate:0
PH:8.2
Salinity: 1.024

I added four fish, powder blue, small blue tang, goldrim tang and a copper band butterfly. What remains is doing great but I do question what happened.

I did not get a great look at the gills but when I did see them the were very red. So like you said it could have been gill damage.

 

[Bectan01]

Did you quarantine all the fish before adding them? The powder didn't look good, did you buy him like that? I would keep an eye on your amm levels in case there is a spike with adding 4 fish at once.

 

[tsharkey]

No he was not quarantined. He was acclimated for 3 hours. He looked much better when I bought him. He lost weight but was eating algae off the rock all the time. I'm really worried something else might happen.

 

[begginersluck]

Unfortunately when a fish crashes like this its almost impossible to recover it.

This is one of the reasons I am holding off ordering a PBT and your system is huge!

 

[tsharkey]

Yeah I'm going to wait quite a while before I attempt one of these fishes again but it was beautiful! Yeah I went from a 55 gal to 210 so it was a big jump! Favorite thing in my tank is my anemones and clownfish. Love watching them dive into my ritteri, sebae or bubble tips!

 

[Wendy8184]

In my experience powder blue tangs are very difficult to keep. They are beautiful fish but very finicky and are very suseptible to disease. They also stress very easily so if there are any other fish that are somewhat aggressive they dont tolerate it well.

 

[Supa Belle]

All tangs are wild caught he may need to be QT and wormed or medicated with some metronidazole and focus in his food with garlic to entice him to eat IMO