Why does every single Tang I put in my tank stop e

I was told the same thing on my first tank i bought used and told not to rinse the sand needless to say i had issues for months and the tank crashed.

I didn't take it offensively !!

We have done a lot of research on each fish we purchased. ( except the blue Chromis ) they were a Spurs of the moment buy because the store said they were not aggressive. We have had a tank tank for years before buying this current one. My husband also worked at A reef aquarium for a while. This tank has a different sand then what we are used to so we aren't sure about it. All our fish are small compared to our tank size and we are waiting to add more. They are all very happy and even the tang is doing great now . The other guy had an issue with keeping tangs alive as well. We did some research and tried different things to try and keep our clown tang alive. We knew he was a difficult tang to keep but just got him because someone didn't want him anymore. We then got a yellow who died after a week. We did some things to try and fix this issue then bought our current tang. He did great for a week then stopped eating for a couple days. Now he is eating again and doing great !!!

As long as the sand remained in the tank and undisturbed (not stirred up pulling stuff out and not stirred by sloshing water during the move) then you might not need to rinse it. The most important thing for the mandarin is pods to eat which live more on rock than in the sand. I always recommend rinsing old sand (even more so with 5 year old sand) to remove built up waste from the sand bed. If it's not rinsed and the sand bed is disturbed during the move it releases lots of waste into the water and will cause a cycle and instability in the tank.

Some more details about how the move was done and what things were done might help narrow the issue even further.

You say you kept everything you moved, did you rinse the sand before adding it back to the tank?

That is great news to hear. Many of us use photo bucket to post pics just as an fyi. I'm not really good like some that can look at a pic and tell you everything right and wrong, I just want to see this tank. Good luck and welcome to the joys of reef keeping.

It likely cycled, assuming you bought it, took it down, and reassembled it. That could explain it. Once you start disturbing the old stuff, its kind of like you are starting again. Assuming to leave stuff, add more stuff, etc. 

The water ranges , all, cal, Nit, mg are all good. Yes 80 is high and it does go up occasionally. We keep the doors and lid open through out the day as well as a fan . We also put a couple frozen bottles of RO water to the sump. We do not have another tank. It has been running for 5 years in a doctors office. We purchased it a couple months ago . We kept all the original Live rocks , sand and water. It came with one coral and a clown fish. Apparently he couldn't keep any of the tangs alive either. So the clown has the whole tank to himself for years. After we purchased it we added the other fish , 3 corals and Anenomes. They are all thriving and seem very happy and content. We can't seem to keep any Tangs alive though.

I can't seem to load any pics.

The tank is beautiful !

Lol, I didn't plan on choosing Aloha007, all the original user names I chose were all taken so I just added numbers to Aloha until one was ok.

Try a different vender. There are certain stores that I won't buy fish from because they always die after a few weeks. I recommend aquatic dreams in Layton. A bit of a drive for you, but I've always had good success with their fish, especially tangs.

They are not showing any other signs of sickness, they just stop eating then died

Edited by Aloha007 - October 03 2015 at 12:45am