**TURN AWAY NOW IF YOU DON'T WANT TO READ A WALL OF TEXT**
Ever since I got back into the salty side of things, wrasses seem to be my bad luck charm.
I had a very healthy Leopard Wrasse that I got off reefwars for my 180G which vanished one weekend with no trace or body.
I lost another Leopard Wrasse in my home tank. Similar scenario, just vanished one day, no body to be found.
I picked up a Blue Sided Fairy Wrasse for my 180G tank yesterday from Ocean Creations that I had put on hold Friday until Han was OK to sell. This wrasse is now not doing that great in my QT tank. Won't swim and barely even bothers to keep himself upright. Only thing is he seem to be very attentive when it comes to his eyes, he's always scanning around the tank but I don't have high hopes for him. I can basically reach in and grab him with my bare hand.
And to top it off, I get home last night, my fish are doing well and all accounted as I walk in the door. Few hours later (only minutes before I was about to go down and feed the tank) I can hear my roommate hollering at me that my tank is making some noise.
I head down stairs and the alarm on my Tunze ATO is beeping wildly and my skimmer is overflowing. Wonderful.
After unplugging the skimmer and ATO I tried to diagnose the problem. Yup, you guessed it... A Wrasse.
As far as I can see, one of my smaller wrasses was able to get through an extra wide gap in my overflow teeth, which would have instantly forced him down the main drain line. Likely getting mangled when he got to the gate valve and forced through whatever small opening there might be. This in turn slowed the flow of the tank and my tank level increased until it began to go down the Emergency drain (thank goodness for Herbie Overflows). With more water going into the tank than what was draining from the tank for a few moments activated my ATO as the levels in the sump dropped a bit.
Once the wrasse had been forced out of the piping the system settled back down which then elevated my sump levels about normal (and above my ATO emergency float switched). This caused my already sensitive skimmer to overflow what it had been skimming since my mini-project on the weekend.
And to top it off, I had a dead, mangled wrasse in the skimmer section of my sump.
Ultimately it could have been a lot worse I suppose but I was finally starting to get this tank back on the road to recovery with my levels, PO4, and what has seemed to be a successful fix for my skimmer issues. So certainly frustrating.
WRASSES!