fish dropping like flies

jessie

jessie

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Mar 3, 2004
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well i used to have a UGF with CC. couple weeks ago i switched to a DSB. over the past couple days my fish have been dropping like flies and now my blue tang has a bad case of ich. temp is 79 degrees..... nitrite 0......nitrate 40ppm( problems with it ever since i set up tank)....ph is 8.2....alk is now 1.9(up from 1.7 a week ago......SG is 1.025. the fish that have died have been from different places. and all the fish that are dead hung around underneath the rocks where my brittle star hid. star has not been eating anything lately. could it be he just likes fish now??? the gramma and goby were doing great at night before they died. eating fine. first it was the goby, and i noticed that it had a hole on the side of its body,and it kinda looked shredded around the edges. one of the lfs said that sometimes stars will eat fish. this is my first star, so im not sure but was told brittle stars were safe. has anyone else ever had a star eat anything, im not saying thats what is going on,,,,, just been told that it is a possibility. total fish lost...... 3 days ago one goby...... just earlier today it was one of my false perculas...........the royal gramma has been mia for 2 days.... im gonna tear down the tank tonight and put everything in a 40 gallon rubbermaid i have. and gonna put the star in with a dead fish in the q tank and see if it eats it... i know that doesnt mean he killed it,,,,,,,, but will just take him out just in case. i have had a few minor setbacks but nothing like this before.
 
Brittle stars will go after fish, if they are not getting enough to eat otherwise. Do you target feed the star? If so, what?
 
wasnt target feeding. was just putting alot of shrimp in the tank for it. was told by lf that it would be fine. now that it may have gotten the fish,,,,,,, will it continue to feed on them or will it quit if i target feed it. should i just target feed it shrimp? thanks for the help.
 
I find it hard to believe a brittle star would be so voracious - how big is it?
Morel ikely your tank is cycling and the fish are dying before the star gets them. What did you do - pull out the uGF and repace it with just sand? Any live rock, any live sand? Any ammonia readings?
Just pulling a UGF and mixing the sand into a DSB is not going to initally be at all effective as the amount of water flow is much lower, and thus the rate of rubbing waste against bacteria is lower.
 
the star is about 10 - 12 inches from tip to tip. ive always had live rock in the tank anyway. i put all the water and rock and fish into a big rubbermaid, took out the coral and UGF, put a DSB in, let it stand for about 36 hours to clear up. then i added about 10 pounds of live sand to that. i also added some softball size nylon balls of my old CC (because it had sand mixed in with it) to the DSB. when i put everything back into it i only had to replace about 7 gallons of fresh water. which is about what i usually change anyway. im not saying 100% that it was the star, just saying that the only fish that died were the ones that hid under the same rock as the star. and since i have taken the star out, now more fish have ended up dead. so if i was to take an edumacated guess,,,,, id say star did it.
 
Brittle stars are not the passive scavengers alot of people think at times, especially when they get large they start to get hungrey alot, any slow moving or sick fish will be eaten by larger starfish (if it can catch them, Brittle stars usually do it by wrapping a tentacle around the fish before it can swim away, although they wont actively hunt down fish)
 
A brittle star will absolutley eat anything that doesn't keep on the constant move. What I am guessing is that when you changed your UGF, your fish got stressed out due to the huge change in the tank. This allowed the star to graze on whatever he wanted, since the fish weren't moving much due to the stress. What kind of brittle is it?

I don't know what else you have in your tank, but if all your inverts are gone, and you're blue tang is still living, you may want to lower that salinity and raise the temperature (both very slowly) in order to kill the ich, rather than adding medication to the water. The warmer the water and the lower the salinity, the less likely the ich will be able to survive in the water.
 
Originally posted by OrionGirl
Brittle stars will go after fish, if they are not getting enough to eat otherwise. Do you target feed the star? If so, what?
Click to expand...

how much is enough to eat? i feed mine cut tup frozen shirmp.
 
A target feeding, once or twice a month, plus what they can scavenge, should be plenty. Mine start hanging out in the open when the lights are on more when they are hungry, so I know they are looking for food and drop something in for them.
 
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