dead clowns

i bought on saturday two ocellaris for my daughters. One of them did not last 8 hours in the tank, so the next day i go buy another one to replace it so my girls don't notice. today (tuesday) both fishes are dead! one dispeared and the other one died a few hours ago.
Ran all my test amonia 0,
nitrite 0,
nitrate 0,
PH 8.2,
phosphate 2.0

everything else seems fine, my coral are still open and inverts still moving.
do you guys have any idea what would be wrong?

i just don't want to go replace those fish if the others are going to die too!

 

Dang! Why are your phosphates so high!?

How did you acclimate the fish? Did the fish come from a "trusted" source? Any signs of disease or odd behavior before they died? Are you using r.o. water or well/city water?

 

the fishes came from a good lfs that we always take everything from and i made them drip for 30 min before dropping them in the tank. they were no sign of any disease on the fishes. i use r/o water and i even use phosban in the sump. don't know why the phosphate are still that high could it kill my fishes?

 

Can you have your fish store test your phosphates for you in case your test kit has gone bad? Do you have a lot of algae or no?

I don't think stray voltage is the culprit seeing as your inverts are ok. Any white spots or filmy looking coating on the clowns? Cloudy eyes? Bloated? Frayed fins? Anything "out of the ordinary"?

 

the clowns had a little ich like one spot or two other then that they looked fine. i could bring water sample to my lfs for phosphate testing. i switched tanks last week, to put everything in my new tank and fuge and i tough that maybe the tank went trough a small cycle and that would have killed the fishes but since my nitrate are ok, i don't know?

 

Recently a lot of LFS's have been fighting ich. Its unusually bad this year for some reason. If the fish had ich in the store when they recieved them, they might have treated prior to putting it out for sale(quarantine) and that could have really stressed the fish out and when they came to your tank with the phosphates so high. That could've been their demise.

 

in other words, you could have bought a weak fish.

 

The ocellaris were tank raised and seemed to look fine at the LFS. They had about 12 of them in the same tank... I also choose my fish carefully so i made sure that they caught the right ones. I just don't know what happened. The disappearing one probably just jumped ship and the cat got some free sushi but 2 dead in a couple of days..... im baffled. Could it be the phosphate???

Marc. (acenia's boyfriend)

 

It could be that your tank had a mini-cycle and your ammonia, nitrite, and/or nitrate rose and dropped so fast that it was back at "0" by the time your clown was dead and you tested your water. I've had this happen to me a time or two. Any chance that you noticed whether or not the fish had stringy, white poo?

 

nope no white poo !