Small white spots

well at least it didn't scare you out of the hobbie. k+ for taking it slow and hanging in there

 

I thought I was going slow the first time .

I've spent way too much on equipment to give up so easily though

 

I would question the frozen fish food, especially the frozen mollies as you called it. If they are for freshwater fish, it can do loads of bad things to saltwater fish, since freshwater fish (served as food) hold no real nutritional value for SW fish. That is why people that feed liofish FW guppies die fairly quickly. Also, do you rinse the frozen foods? It will help wash away some of the high phosphate frozen water used to pack the foods. Definitely get a good skimmer, it is one of the biggest, if not the biggest factors in keeping a healthy tank and not. Before you get anymore fish, I would wait at least 6 weeks or more. If it was any parasitic form, like ick, their lifecycles are usually 6 weeks. You want the tank free of any hosts (in this case fish, corals, etc) so it will die off. If the problem was fungal, you may want to nuke the tank with an antibiotic, like nitrofurizone or ethromycin to kill the bacteria. Then run your skimmer like mad, let it sit for the 6 weeks, then try one damsel to see if it reoccurs. If it does, drain the tank, boil the rock and sand with hypersalinity water, wash the tank and all components with vinegar or bleach water, then heavily rinse all that with clean water and restart your tank from scratch. Note: that's what I had to do with my 150G tank, so I can empathize with your pain and frustration. Hang in there.

 

Thanks tiger, this was pretty much my plan. The skimmer has to be ordered in so I'm not sure how much of the 4-6 weeks will be skimming. I also left the corals in there as I have nowhere to put them. I wasn't aware they can host the parasites :/. They don't seem to have the dots on them that the fish did. I hope I don't have to start from scratch and bleach and whatnot though.. that sounds like a real pain. Maybe if it happens again I'll make a reef only tank with no fish, just crabs, corals and other inverts .

As for the damsel, aren't they a pretty hardy fish? I thought I'd be better off getting a cheap fish that's sensitive to this sort of thing (maybe a cheap clown).

 

Regarding the food, I was feeding frozen mysis shrimp, but my tusk fish could never be bothered swimming around eating the things flying around in the current, so I also fed him something that looks like these .Ocean nutrition silver sides 8.4oz provide an excellent source of protein and oils for predator-type carnivorous meat eating fishes. but is just labeled "Whole Fish". I assume it's silverside after seeing that; they just look like mollies .

The clown fish got noticeably sick first and was only eating mysis shrimp.