chromis and shrimp dead - where are the bodies?

homer_marge · 10-08-2007, 03:51 PM

Hi everyone,

It's been awhile since we've posted....but we have a question..

We had one of our green chromis die and our cleaner shrimp not too long after also died. Then we couldn't find one of our emerald crabs and later found his dead body. But we never did find the chromis or shrimp bodies?
could the other fish have eaten them and what could have caused them to die?

Our nitrates are 20, a little high, but we're working on getting that lower. We just cleaned our impeller and that seems to have helped. We were having a problem with our water getting really gungy only after a few days from the water change?? We do a water change weekly...but I think our media filters need changing more frequently.

Anyways, just thought we'd ask about our dead creatures...any thoughts to why they died and where did the bodies go? Could this also be causing our water to be gungy? And I mean gungy...brown floaty stuff!

thanks!
homer_marge

Nereaga · 10-09-2007, 03:52 PM

I'm not too sure about how they died, but it is possible for the crabs, snails, and stars to have cleaned up the bodies, quickly too. It doesn't take too long for them to consume a small chromis/cleaner shrimp.

As for the water, what kind of water are you using? What kind of filters do you currently run? The live rock you have should be able to handle your bio-load.

Brad

homer_marge · 10-09-2007, 07:42 PM

didn't know that the inverts could/would eat up dead bodies...thanks.

we are using dechlorinated tap water with a water conditioner added to it.
Never really had a problem this bad before. As for the filter, we have a TOM system - from the bottom up: sintered glass cylinders, bioballs, carbon pillow, carbon pad, polyfibre pad; then the prefilter pad in the overflow skimmer.
I just think we have to change our filters more often...we also were not getting a lot of stuff or bubbles in our protein skimmer? so that's when we cleaned our impeller in our water pump. So far the water doesn't look too bad, but could be cleaner and we're getting more bubble in the protein cup,
which is encouraging....

this hobby is so much trial and error! and being a detective...which we don't mind.

thanks!