dead male seahorse

[marc_bc]

hi,
yesterday one of our make seahorse died, it was pretty sad to see him getting his last breath.
anyway about 4 weeks ago we seen that his was getting bigger and came to the conclusion he was having babies, but about a week later his poach when flat, about 2 weeks later his poach was big again, and he was swimming fine, ( he did not have swimming problem or floating to the top ) so we came to the conclusion that it was not air bubble.

no apparent lesion or cut
He was eating just 2 day before. ( m wife hands feed them 2 a day)
can anyone give me some light on what could have happen.

I have a 55g tank with 6 herectus seahorse total
sump 15g, skimmer in sump
80lb live rocks, no other fish in tank
lost of grass & other place for the seahorse to grab on.
I have copepods living in the tanks that they seem to enjoy grazing on all day on top of the frozen misys shrimp they are eating.
I have had this seahorse since September 30th, have not had any reason or sign to think this would have happen.
PH 8.2
salt 1.025
ammonia 0
nitrite 0
nitrate <2ppm

I change 10g water per week

thanks.
marc

 

[rayjay]

I don't believe anyone is going to tell you for certain just what the cause of death was without a pathology report to tell you.
It's my belief that water quality issues are usually responsible for a myriad of problems like nasty bacteria, GBD, liver, kidney and internal chemical imbalances.
This is something that usually happens after a period of time, as water quality slowly degenerates.
There are no hobby kits that can tell you this is occuring so one just has to do more extreme husbandry than you would for a reef tank. (at the minimum)
Each tank set up is different and like people, some seahorses are more tolerant of poor conditions than others so there is no one set guidline for all tanks.
However, IME, 10g/week is not sufficient for any of my tanks that are mostly 40g.
When doing a water change, the water is removed primarily by vacuuming up uneaten food and detritus after having dislodged trapped particles from decor, macro and grasses, and blowing it out from behind and around rocks, after of course it has been allowed to settle.
Any mechanical filtratiion needs to be VERY frequently cleaned of any trapped detritus BEFORE it decomposes to any degree.