Crap..well idk what to do then introduce another one? Or two? I rather not have 4 anthias so I can add other fish..Could I try another type of anthias with better chance of living? I feel like i'm sentencing it to death lol i'm not sure if I'm getting another male or female or what b.c they are all the same color..Plus my bioload is getting heavy. I plan on adding 2-4 more fish and already have 3 wrasses & two clowns. Plan on adding two tangs , marine beta, CBB.
That would leave me with :
4 anthias
2 clowns
Cleaner wrasse
6 line wrasse
flasher wrasse
Yellow tang
1 other tang
Copperband Butterfly
marine beta(maybe)
too much?
Unless you have a couple of large fish in there I would ditch the cleaner wrasse.
I personally would also ditch the tangs and rather get a pair of copperbands.
Same goes for the wrasses: keep them in pairs, especially the flasher.
While I'm a big fan of marine bettas, one alone is something I would never do as you may not see much of it, especially if you have a lot of large restless fish like tangs in the tank.
If you really want marine bettas you should design the tank for them (lots of rock with many caves and crevices) and add two or more small ones of distinct different size. That way you will get a pair or a harems group and see much more of them.
As for the anthias: I feel they need a clear hierarchy or otherwise you will have lots of fights going on while they try to fight it out. Also keep in mind that in the wild each of them has a good size buffer space around them. It only looks like a dense swarm from afar.
A group of anthias would be something I would love to add to my tank, but I'm afraid 100 gallon isn't enough.
:thumbsup: Completely agree.
Although I find other fish much more entertaining than tangs, ...
I couldn't agree more. I personally find a pair of banggai cardinals more interesting that any tang and banggais can be rather boring fish. I keep them primarily for breeding.
From your post I can tell you that you are either not acclimating the fish properly, your tank is not ready or you LFS is bad source. They should not die within 24hrs. Is the salinity in your tank the same as the LFS? If yours is higher you should slowly acclimate the fish to the new salinity. How slowly? Well that depends on the difference but going from low to high usually causes trouble if done too fast and yes, the dripping method might be too fast.
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For future reference, this might be too fast. Most LFS keep very low salinity in their fish tanks to "avoid" ich. When going from low to high salinity many recommend to raise by 0.001-0.002 a day.
You will hear many saying that they do it faster without issues, but you also see many posts like yours saying "My fish died within a day or 2 even though my tank has perfect conditions"... they are overlooking this aspect and try to find other causes that are not necessarily there.
The best thing to do, if buying from a place with lower salinity (most fish stores) , is to have a smaller tank ready with the same salinity as your source. You will only need to float the bags for about 20min to match temperature. Check the salinity in the bag just to be sure it matches the one in the smaller tank. Then, adjust the salinity (up) over the course of a few days until it matches your display.
Fish see significant salinity swings around the nominal of 1.025 g/l in the wild and can handle them well.
The 0.001-0.002 a day only applies if you bring fish out of hyposalinity where they have been at around 1.008 for a couple of weeks or even months. At that salinity the fish's kidneys are working on a largely reduced scale and couldn't handle a rapid increase of volume that the fish would need to dring to maintain its osmotic balance.
But as soon as you get to 1.016 g/l you can bring the fish to full salinity within an hours.
If the LFS has his system at 1.018 it is absolutely sufficient to just drip acclimate the fish.
Though in a QT I would in general try to keep the salinity lower.
