Why am I killing clowns?

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zar

AC Members
Nov 22, 2004
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I know, a strange title... :rant:

I have had the HARDEST time keeping clowns alive. My first attempt ended in death after about 6 hours (my fault; poor aclimatization technique). My second ended in death after 3 days (not sure what was the cause here). My most recent attempt, last week with a mated pair, ended in the larger female dying after about 4 days. The male is still going strong 8 days later.

ALL of my chemistries are dead-on correct, with maybe the exception that the SG is about 1.026 (a bit high IMHO, and I'm slowly getting it down). I am currently fighting a cyano breakout in the past week, but other than those, everything is good. Cannister filter in great shape, skimmer working fine, etc. Tank is a 30g with tons of LR, multiple cleaners, active coralline algae, etc.

In between all of those clowns, I've successfully added -- with absolutely no problems or deaths, I might add -- a blue damsel, a yellow goby and a bicolor blenny, not to mention multiple cleaner types and hard and soft corals.

Is there something unusual about clowns that no one has told me? Or some special way of getting them aclimatized? Or??? I'm really at a loss for why I can't seem to get clowns to survive in this tank.

Any insight would be appreciated.

thanks,
bruce
 

VDub90

AC Members
Oct 23, 2004
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Nanaimo, BC
I had a tough time as well. I've had 2 die on me. One I've had for a month and a half, the other about 2 weeks, everything seems fine now. The ones in the tank now I QT'd them for about a week and a half and dosed with Mela/Pima fix before adding to the main tank. From what I have read alot of clowns have infections and/or dieases from the store.
 

mogurnda

vaguely present
Apr 29, 2003
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Your specific gravity is fine. One problem may be that the LFS was keeping them in very low specific gravity (1.017 is not uncommon), and they needed even longer acclimation than normal.

If you have been having good luck with other species, I might suspect a bad supply. Were all the clowns from the same source?
 
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