Yellow Tangs go to heaven

I’m introspective by nature and when something happens that bothers me I’ll examine it way too much.  So, when a yellow tang died on me a few weeks back after being in my tank for a few months, I wanted to find out why.  I’m going to see where this takes me over the next few posts.

Once fish make it past the two month mark in my tank, I don’t lose fish all that often.  Most of the fish in my display have been with me at least a year, and many of them two or three years.  My frag tank has only been up for about 6 months, so the fish in there are much younger.

I don’t usually stock exotic fish.  I’ve found them to be fussy and expensive and I’d rather put that time, energy and money into coral.  The two exceptions are the Copperband Butterfly and Filefish, who are under the two month line .

My current stocking list looks like this:

So you can see that most of my fish have been around a while.  They’re starting to get to the stage where I’d consider them a long term success ™.  They’re all (with the possible exception of the filefish – I’m still working on getting them eating frozen) well fed, healthy and living pretty good lives considering they’re in a glass box far away from their natural habitat.

Not my tank…but I can dream.

I had a yellow tang in my display for about 3 and a half years.  I got him just after I got my clownfish and they lived in the same tank through a couple of moves.  In December of 2008, he went carpet surfing and I found him when my cat was batting around his dried out corpse.

I waited an appropriate period of time until I went and picked up a new one about 4 months ago.  Last week I found him stuck to an intake; alive, just barely.  He was too weak to swim.  He died the next morning.

So, what happened?  The yellow made it past the requisite 2 months, ate like a pig but never fattened up like the rest of his tank mates.  He just got skinnier and skinnier until it faded away.  The fish wasn’t shy, was always picking at the rocks and ate well when I fed the tank.  Something was really wrong.  My experience has been that yellow tangs are tough and adapt to tank life quickly.  There were no marks on his body and I’ve never observed any aggression in that tank.

I ruled out parasites.  Nobody else in my tank is sick.  The yellow in the frag tank is connected to the same system and is healthy.  There were no other signs of disease.

Something dosen’t add up.  I’ll never know for sure what killed him, but one theory that popped into my head is cyanide.

Here are the symptoms of a cyanided fish:

The symptoms can be very elusive and often resemble problems associated with poor acclimation. Some of the symptoms include lack of appetite, malnutrition, disorientation, unstable swimming position, and secondary parasite infestations. What really perplexes some aquarists is that these symptoms do not always manifest themselves immediately. They see the fish eating and swimming normally for weeks and sometimes months before the effects are observed or the fish finally dies.

The last sentence really hits home.  Is it conclusive that my fish was cyanided?  Not at all, but from the evidence, I’d say it’s a possibility.

Next time I’ll look more closely at cyanide and the impact it has on marine life.

Related posts:

1. Angels, tangs and wrasses
2. Yellow is the colour of envy
3. Fish, Bags, and The Double Check
4. “A black eye on the industry”
5. a wrassy beginning..

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