Im so bummed please help!

I just found my 5 year old maroon clown dead after not seeing him for a couple days... as of last week Ive had a watchmen goby for about 4 years and the clown along with a skunk shrimp and thats it. My tank is extremely stable and ive always fed my fish every couple days with flake food. Last week I decide a new addition would be nice so i gathered up some frags and drove and hour to the LFS. I knew i wanted so Anthias so I asked the girl at the store what she though and she directed me toward getting 3 instead of two as they will do better together. Im not an impulse buyer and never trust my lfs but seeing how it was an hour away I took her advise of buying some Mysis Shrimp. I was reluctant as flake food has worked fine for me the last 8 years but she insisted that the anthias would not eat other wise. So i bought the food and have been feeding them half a cube once a day. Now only one of three anthias are alive and the Ive lost my Clown. Im just lost the tank looks so empty and i cant put my finger on way this would happen except for the shimp. Ive used them b4 in frozen cubes just like these but not ever more then once a month.... Any ideas? any problems with mysis b4 ? all my levels are fine and the temp is 74 to 76

 

What size of a tank do you have, 3 Anthias can overload even the most stable tanks when smaller sized.

 

Thats exactly what I thought... 55 gallon tank ive never lost 3 fish in a week. I stressed this point at the lfs and she seemed to brush off my concern about adding 3 fish and actually recommended it

 

like i said the tank is very stable and I didnt see any spike in my levels when i was testing.

 

Sorry for your loss, I wish you the best in finding the root cause and recovering which I am sure you will.

 

The advice, IMO, you got from the LFS was correct. Anthias are very high metabolism fish and really need a couple small feedings a day and are pretty tough to get them to eat only flakes. With that said, and the fact you only had two other fish in the tank prior to their addition, my guess is your system wasn't able to handle the 100+% increase in the bioload. Certainly tough to pinpoint the exact cause, but that's my thought...

 

I agree with that. Your bioload was pretty light and adding the 2 anthias at once could have caused a spike, even though you didn't detect one. I highly doubt it is the food, although you did feed a lot. 1/2 a cube is a lot of mysis shrimp. That adding to the bioload and the 3 fish is probably what did them in.