false percs with black spots

[Reefer_man]

I have a pair of false perculas that have been doing quite well in my new reef tank (2 months old), although just a few days ago I noticed that he had some black spots on different parts of his body. Is it due to stress maybe? I've been having some issues recently with my return pump. It is pumping the water faster than the gravity syphon can feed water to it so there have been days when i come home from work or when I wake up in the morning that the pump is sucking in air and my tanks has been filled with tiny air bubbles. I installed a valve to restrict the flow back into the tank but even with it almost all the way shut it occasionally sucks some air still. I was reading about black ich and I don't really think that is it, but I am a noob and I could be wrong. Parts of his black bands seem to be bleeding into the orange parts of his body. Any thoughts? suggestions?

 

[Juck]

This is probably just melanism (hard to see clearly in your pics),, quite normal in clowns.

 

[Anonymous]

What does your clown host in? Do you have zoanthids in the tank?

 

[Reefer_man]

Currently my clowns aren't hosting in anything. They spend there time swimming all around the tank protecting a small blue chromis that is getting picked on by a slightly larger blue chromis. I do have zoo's in my tank. I have a xenia elongata, kenya tree leather, neon green hairy shrooms, brownish red shrooms, and some zoo's that I'll include pics of. Well actually i'm not wuite sure what the one colony is actually called. The LFS told me it was a kind of Zooanthid. My water quality has been damn near perfect since I set up the tank. So you think the Zoo's are stinging the clowns? the spots have gotten worse in the past few days. I'll try to get some better pics but it is hard because they move so fast. I have a decent 8 MP sony cam to use but I still need to play with it a little more to figure out how to get the fast moving foreground objects in better focus. Thanks for your help. This forum is a great resource and I spend way too much time at work gaining knowledge from it.

 

[Reefer_man]

sorry i tried to attach this to my earlier post

 

[Reefer_man]

i have two colonies of this one...

 

[Anonymous]

I've just heard of ocellaris clowns developing black dots when hosting in zoanthids. Presumably from getting stung. Don't know for sure if that's what you've got though.

 

[Reefer_man]

Sorry... I forgot to mention the frogspawn in my earlier post. I figured you guys saw it in the picture I guess. I'll quit posting now. one more pic of my overall tank just because...

 

[Tarasco]

Here's some good info on black spot disease in clowns. The clown in the first pic does not appear to have it, though:

http://www.reefsanctuary.com/forums/sho ... fish+spots

I think that you only really have to worry if the spots are raised bumps.