In the past 4 weeks I have lost 3 fish, all of them between 2-10 days new to the tank. The first was a nervous dispar anthia, the second a gorgeous 1.5 inch coral beauty and 3rd was a 2.5 inch diamond sandsifting goby. The first possibly hid and starved to death. But the others were eating well, mixing with other fish and just enjoying life. The goby was spewing sand and doing its thing. It disappeared 5 days after receiving it so even if it wasn't eating it wouldn't have died of starvation that quickly?
Since my tank has a firm fine mesh lid, my basement sump access is blocked by the overflow box with narrow flow slits and im cautious of having the lid open after my cleaner wrasse jumped and ended in the aircon vent (and survived) I've ruled out those escape routes. My CUC is one very polite hermit crab, 1 scarlet skunk and 3 lazy peppermint shrimp and lots of various snails. The other fish are a purple tang, clown tang, 2 clownfish, 2 Rollands damsels, 1 blue green chromis, 1 mandarin, 1 yellow Coris wrasse, 1 cleaner wrasse, 1 firefish, 1 Royal dottyback, 1 filefish and one yellow watchman goby. And they all seem pretty happy.
My 100 gallon tank has a 40 g sump and the water params are good except maybe for a 0.09 Po4 at the time of the incident. It has lots of hiding places but not enough to have a toxic build up of poison water pockets i read about elsewhere. I also rearranged a few rocks to look for them. So my thoughts turn to my coral. Specifically my large BTA and my gigantic elegance coral.
I've recently begun to get minor tingles when they touch my skin but I'm sure the fish could survive the touch. But are these able to catch and swallow whole healthy fish? My elegance is rather fond of nassarius escargot on occasion. My less intelligent clownfish won't go near them but I've seen the diamond goby swim over and through the tentacles of the elegance. In fact my yellow watchman and a peppermint shrimp have shacked up together and are living underneath the elegance fleshy folds in fishy sin. So is it the BTA then that grabbed a careless fish? Problem was the coral beauty never really travelled to that side of the tank.
It's not the loss of $200 but losing pretty fish that were hard to get where I live. So I'm weary to get more. At a loss as to why 2 disappeared within 4 days of eachother.