Urgent UPDATE: Anemone died and One fish!!

This is why these forums are good for knowledge. You can take advice from a bunch of people and learn from it. Not any one person is right. Your anemone may have died from improper acclimation or from handeling it to much, or it may have ingested soemthing toxic at the lfs. Unless an autopsy is done we will never know. Of course too much ammonia donates h ions to the water thus making it more acidic. However, I know one person who has a 46 bow and all he keeps are anemones. His water params are never stable due to overstocking of fish; he never acclimates anything. The anemone's crawl around until they find a spot they like then they stay there and he has never lost one. Just saying there can be more than one answer to a question.

 

take a water sample to the local fish store. most test for free. i didn't see an ammonia reading. do you test for that? its important. your tanks still young and it doesn't take much to throw it into a small cycle again. with that anemone dieing, it could have sent the tank into a cycle again. ammonia will kill fish fast.

 

ive had many tanks and anemones and fish in the past and i can tell you all i did to acclimate everything i got was just float the bag. leaving it in the bag with that fluctuating water causes mroe stress then lack of acclimation! i have never had an anemone die in one of my aquariums i cant say the same about fish but the deaths were minimal and werent caused by lack of acclimation. this is not a lack of acclimation. probably was just messed with too much. how old is your tank?

 

Which one? See my sig. I have a FW tank older then you are.

You have contradicted yourself- please clarify.

Messed with too much? Why would you mess with ANY critter? Acclimation is not just temps and water quality- it also includes tank mates, rock scape enviroment, lighting cycles, you name it. That is why you need to first understand what you are buying then consider the tank you have and the enviroment of your tank.

Simple, straight forward, and requires some patience. But most importantly. the ability to understand why these things are so important for the life of any SW tank.

 

It sounds like you did this correctly. Assuming you repeated adding water to the bag. How many times did you do so?

However, 300ppm alk is 16.8 dkh which is really high 7.8 pH is on the low side of the acceptable range. Assuming this reading is correct and this is as low as it gets, then this isn't a problem at all. However, if it's dropping lower, at night for example, this could be an issue. I'm not sure I believe this or your alk test though. If your alk is 16.8 dKH, your pH should be much higher. If this is the case. Or you have a ton of CO2.
I would recheck your alk with another test kit. If it really is this high, that could certainly be the issue.

 

I have the dip strips and its hard to match the colors. Pay day im buying a different testing kit because this one is so unreliable. It says 300 Alk is green and is lower it gets its more of a yellow. My tests have always read navy blue... no idea why. My Ph is deffinately at 7.8 though. I will get my water tested this week. Thanks

 

The dipsticks are useless. Definitely see if someone can test it for you in the meantime. It is very important, especially if keeping sensitive invertebrates.

 

Can I just point out that 7.8 PH is not horrible. And many things can adapt to it with a slow acclimation.... Key being keeping the param steady.

 

i use the dip strips for a fast look at whats going on. if im in doubt i pull the real test kits out. (test tubes, water, drops, all that fun stuff...lol) but i have found the strips to be pretty accurate, im using the 5 in one ... i believe api is the brand.

 

Those are the strips I have too.... how much are the heavy duty test kits gonna cost me?