Day Two: Bad News
- anacoralswa
- Jul 30
- 3 min read
Everything seemed to be going great during day two! There were still a bunch of tiny fry, they were still looking like mosquitoes, they were still swarming. I was still terrified.
I added more rotifers in the morning. Spoiler alert -- things didn't go well today (though I do have some stragglers, so all is not lost). In retrospect, I may have added too many rotifers at this point, or too much phytoplankton? I have a few theories about what went wrong, one of which is that the rotifers basically outcompeted them, whether that was because of dissolved oxygen, or ammonia, or something else having to do with there being way more rotifers in the tank than these guys needed.
Anyway, long story short: around five o'clock in the afternoon I came in to check on them. As I watched, they started dropping out of the water column and landing on the bottom. I panicked. I immediately added more water and Seachem Prime, my assumption at that point being that there was a cascading ammonia spike. Then I spent the next few hours trying to make things better in there and remove anything that might be contributing ammonia -- I did a partial water change (sucking out lots of dead fry), then topped it off again, then did another partial change, etc. I even tried putting a couple of the still-living fry into another (small but stable) tank that I have (that didn't work out either).
I also looked at a few of the "dead" ones under a microscope and saw some of their tiny hearts still beating, slowly. At the time, I took that to mean they were in the middle of dying and broke out the clove oil; in retrospect, I do wonder if they would have made it (did I scare them? were they just tired?)
Really, though, all told, it was just a disaster. Lessons learned:
As EVERYONE on the internet has said, they scare easily. I may have moved too fast or had too many lights on. I'll make the sides of the tank black next time!
Maybe don't give them quite so many rotifers?
At some point I should have actually tested the ammonia levels, rather than just assuming that was the issue!
It probably would have been fine to leave at least some of the "dead" fry in the tank to see if they were actually alive and could recover...
Eventually I got to a point where there were still a handful swimming around, seeming relatively stable, and the water was clearer. So I let them spend the night in there. But yeah. Day 2 kind of sucked.
A few days later: okay, so after watching the survivors for a couple more days, I wonder if maybe this wasn't actually as bad as I thought it was? This was the first time I'd had a clutch of clownfish eggs hatch out like this, so I was kind of expecting them all to just die (ref. day one terror). Ergo, what I thought I saw was all of them dying. But it turns out baby clownfish (or at least my baby clownfish) are kind of like toddlers: they'll run around eating everything, zipping around all over the place, and then when they're tired, they just sort of collapse and head for the bottom of the tank. In the days since, I've seen extremely healthy-looking ones do exactly the same thing as these "dead" ones did, and then perk right back up and show up out of nowhere the next day. Lesson learned.