Awful damsels chasing my clowns!

Pretty darn small hook.......Av8bluewater, looked at the pics of the setup of your tank, loved it, how did you do your rock like that?

 

How exactly are the yellow tails going after the clowns? Are they chasing and nipping or actually fighting? It doesn't look like the clowns have been injured in any way (no sores, fins intact, etc). I would leave them to sort it out and only do what you are currently doing in a case of EXTREME emergency. There's two things that stand out to me now: that the fish are just naturally going the territorial/pecking order disputes, or that your clowns are indeed sick (which you hinted at) and the damsels may be trying to kill them because of it (yes this does happen all the time in nature). I would establish for sure whether or not they are sick first: if they are they (the clowns) need to be removed from the tank completely. If they are not, let them go and wait it out a few days and see what happens. YT's are not tough fish. They will try and talk a big game a lot, but a healthy clown pair (even as juveniles) should easily dominate them. Heck, even my eyelash blenny dominates my damsels. But either way, your definitely not doing the clowns any good caging them up in the corner of the tank.

 

From experiences, I will now cycle with the damsel in the sump rather than the DT If i can't catch him.. i can just leave him there! At any rate, what has worked for me catching fish is using a 4" diameter piece of pipe.. i put some food in the pipe.. let the fish go in to get food... once in, put your hands on both sides to trap him in. Worked on my clowns. Hope this helps.

 

clowns are no competition at all to damsels what soever.. i can net my clowns with my 70 pounds of live rock in my 40G
if i were you, don't feed for a day, let the damsels get hungry then do several small feedings, wait for the damsels to move up to the top to take food.. put flakes at the top of the water.. and once it gets close, get your net ready to get the net a dive and grab the damsel, that is probably the only possible way, has worked for me

good luck!

 

Damsels rock. I love damsels. Little fish with BIG attitudes. I have three in my 90g. A yellowtail, a humbug and a yellow. They pretty much found their niche and have stayed there. That is what is going to happen with your fish. They will fight a little and then, once they establish dominance and territory, all will be well......

 

I just went through this I had to tear out all of my live rock to get out the 2 blue damsels that have been in the tank for 3 yrs. They are impossible to catch. lol. I put all the coral on the bottom while I took the 50lb's of live rock out. Makes for a fun day.

 

Have you seen this? http://www.3reef.com/forums/i-made/diy-fishtrap-42442.html

 

thanks I used PVC pipes and plastic industrial zip ties

Posted via Mobile Device:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5G77 Safari/525.20

 

I can lend you my dragon eel, he can catch them pretty fast, ok jokes aside. I had simular issue. After my last damsel pass on, I decided never to buy one again. no Damsels, no chromis

sometimes you can trade at your lFS.

 

damsels are feeder fish arent they? just kidding i think they are an awsome fish but, i dont like them. i went through the same thing in my first tank. just get it over with and take out so rock and catch those little buggers and your problem will be gone