Had a mortality - Help save his tank mate
 

I'm not sure what happened to this Green Chromis. He has been in the QT for two weeks and I noticed yesterday that he was swimming slightly off kilter. The QT is 10 gal with a bio wheel filter. The water specs are:
Temp 26C (in the past two days it has ranged from 28 to 25)
Ammonia 0
Nitrite 0
Nitrate 0
Sp G 1.023 (was up to 1.027 a couple of days ago but I've been adding freshwater to bring it down)

I do 20% water changes every other day with water from my main tank (same water specs but 27C).

I thought he might have had HLLE because I could make out a black line from his head along his side to the tail. I noticed the line two days ago. He had not been eating as well as the other chromis in the tank.

The LFS told me that is shuch a small QT I should only feed them once every three days and only so much as they could eat in 3 mintues.

These are/were my first fish and I would sure like to keep this last one alive.

I did notice that they looked a little blotchy but after I turned the canopy light on thier colour came back so I figured it was nothing.

I posted a post mortum picture on www.reefs.org too.

With added stresses of varying temps and salinity, your ailing chromis will have a hard time recovering as it is.

Add to the stresses a starvation diet (one feeding every three days), and it has even less of a chance. You'll read that these fish feed almost continuously in the wild, surfing the currents flowing over the reef.

I hope you can save it, but I don't know that you're getting the best advice from your LFS. There are some chromis-based threads on the board - have you searched them out? Lots of people have these fish.

I agree. The fish needs to eat more...a lot more! I have a school of 9 chromis and they feed all day, picking at the particles in the tank. Keep the temp stable, normal salinity should be 1.026.
Many fish are blotchy when the y wake up in the morning, no worries there.

Thanks for the help guys. I checke in with the wetwebmedia.com crew and they felt the same way. In lieu of the fish loss, I've installed a spunge filter in addition to the bio-wheel and will look at a 20 gal QT for the next batch.

Jim