Sudden Death

[NTidd]

Well let's start with what I had in this aquarium:

1 Blue Damsel
2 black chromis (not sure on the name)
1 Coral Beauty
2 Cleaner Shrimp
Many various hermits
1 Pepermint shrimp
1 thorny starfish
1 turbo snail

Ok, my problem is that about a week ago I had to replace the heater and it took me a while to steady the tempature, it fluctuated for about a week from 74 degrees to 82 degrees. They all seemed to be doing ok, but about halfway through the week 1 of the cleaner shrimp died, it had only been in the tank for about a week or two, so I figured it was from stress. Well after about a week I turned the light on and one of the black chromis' were dead. The blue damsel wouldn't come out from under a piece of live rock. The other damsel was fine but the coral beauty seemed discolored. All of the invertabraes seem absolutly fine. Well I shut off the light tonight and about an hour later I turned it back on and the blue damsel was out, he looks really bad, discolored and skin or something over his eyes. The coral beauty seems discolored and isn't swimming around much, the black damsel seems normal. Also 2 days ago I upgraded from a 20 watt to a 55 watt system. All of the water checks out ok with ammonio (0) nitrites (0) nitrates were low, and the ph is fine. I have had the 3 damsels from the very begining when I set up this tank (29g). Anyone have any ideas?

-Update, I have noticed that the coral beauty's back fin is slowly falling apart, the blue damsels is black with white in between the scales. The other black damsel still looks fine.

-Update, All of the fish died last night, I got up a few hours after I went to bed and the coral beauty had died, the blue guy was still alive, and the black fish looked fine, in the morning the blue guy was dead, looked horrible, and the black fish was dead, and looked absolutely fine, there were just stress bars on him, other than that everything looked fine on him. Does anyone know what could of caused this? All of the inverts are still fine. I am almost afraid to add a new fish. There are now no fish in this tank but everyone else is fine.

 

[toodles]

Sorry to hear about your fish

It almost sounds like a bacterial infection (especially with the dorsal fin disintegrating like that)......but really, anything could have started up once the fish were stressed out like that. Best thing I can advise is to make sure your temp is stable, do a couple of water changes over the next week or two, then once you are confident that whatever was at work is gone, then start to slowly add fish again.
I just wanted to say again, how sorry I am to hear about what happened......I know how hard it can be to lose animals that you have become attached to......

 

[NTidd]

Yeh, it is hard, especially when those 3 damsels have been there since I set the tank up, my cleaner shrimp seems lonely. I plan on waiting a week or two, after a couple water changes, and then I'm going to add a green chromis possibly.

 

[Fishman_2000]

That stinks most of them are gone. I think the temperature fluctuations stressed them enough to get sick like that. What kind of heaters do you have? The best heaters I've seen are the Hagen Tronic heaters. I can relate to you, I recently lost most of my fish. But it's all under control now. Good luck.