Missing Fish..How long?

I am amazed, I sit right in front of my tank most days. I am retired and my desk and fish tank both take up most of our dining room. (I have a great wife) So I look at my tank a lot. While looking the other day, I realized that my foxface was missing, Now this is a fairly large fish to just be missing, I looked and looked moved rocks and looked behind the tank for carpet surfers...none to be found.
While taking a real look into the tank everything seemed dull, and lackluster. After testing the water I found the nitrates very high and can only assume that this otherwise healthy fish had died and been consumed by the cuc.

So my question is How long have you gone without realizing that a fish was missing?

 

longest i had gone was 2 days. mccoskers wrasse, thought it was spooked and hidng. found it the 2nd day under some furniture . it flipped and kept on flopping til it got underneath. another day, and probably woulda started to stink. lol. and sorry about your foxface.

 

if its a single fish i usually notice right away but if its 1 chromis and i have 10,i wont notice for a week

 

I wanted to ask since I just noticed that one of my chromis is missing (been probably Half to a whole day), if you had a FOWLR only tank, would you rearrange your tank looking for that 1 fish? Not sure if it died and my hermit crabs got to him or if hes just hiding in a spot that I cant see.

 

I would not do that Foreverfishy - hope it does turn up again for you
but, you could cause more issues with your hands in, moving stuff around, than will result from the natural decomposition of a single decaying fish

I would let nature take its course, it may be hiding , may have been bullied into hiding by AN other Chromis

how big is the tank it is in?

 

I had a Yellow Watchman Goby lve in my internal overflow box for over two years. I was under the tank one day cleaning the sump and I happened to see a reflection and movement in the overflow from the lights above. I pulled the canopy off and netted the fish out of the overflow putting him back in the display.
Next day he was back in the overflow and I did it all over again but watched him this time. I found out the 6 Line Wrasse was bullying him so he was hiding out in there.

I moved the Watchman to my 16G nano and he has been fine the last 4 years.

 

My tank is 125 gal. I did move some rocks but I did find it...(which I could tell that cause some stress on the other fish. What I did to hopefully ease the stress was to slowly turned the lights off hoping that it will calm them down)

You are right steve, I probably should have let nature take it's course. hard to just stand there and not do anything when I am the one that purchased the fish and should look after it and care for it's health and well being. (trying to be responsible)

 

I hope to never have a fish go into my overflow because I would never be able to get it out do to its location..I am glad that you had good results with a happy ending!

 

That's awesome

 

I have a Hooven's (Melanarus) Wrasse and a female Christmas Wrasse. One day the Christmas Wrasse decided she did not like the Hooven's Wrasse. That poor fish buried it's self for over a week until it was exhausted and looking for food. I was able to net him and transfer him to another tank (very lucky fish).

My tank is a 150 gallon reef tank and I only have a total of 15 fish. If one is missing I can tell right away. I'm a stay-home-dad so every day I am keeping my eyes on both my tanks. I can't move my live rock without the high risk of damaging some of my LPS and SPS.

Long story short is that when a fish goes missing which happened when the tank was young, I would start and strongly suggest doing daily nitrate readings. Clean-up crews will only go so far removing dead fish. You can watch the nitrates go up if the tank is smaller and you would then do more frequent water changes to keep things healthy.

Bottom line is that no matter how hard you try to keep all the little guys healthy and happy we all have those fish that just don't make it.