A little good news, a little bad.....
Bad news first.....we did loose the red stripe to fin rot or something else like it. He started coming out in the morning with sand all over him. We figured out that's what it was because it would be gone in a couple hours after the lights were on and he became active, he was apparently 'sleeping' in the sand bed. Over the next two days he still ate like crazy, but his fins started to get frazzled. Everyone else in the tank was fine. (Chromis, snails, crabs, hermits) Then one day he just never came out from behind the rock, and later that evening he was dead. All the water parameters were still well within range according to our tests, and since nothing else in the tank got ill, we have no explanation. He never stopped eating until the last day, so we had hoped he would recover. We miss him! =( We've never treated any of our tanks with any success so we opted not to medicate at all. Everytime we've ended up spending too much money and loosing the fish anyway. *shrug* We had no way to set up a quarintine salt tank and we figured the shock of moving him from one to the other might just kill him anyway. We've been there, done that, too.....
The good news is we have added the rest of our cleaning crew, and I think they are my favorite part of the tank! We have Nassarias (?) snails, more blue leg hermits, some turbo snails, another kind of snail, and 5 emerald crabs. Feeding time is hilarious! The entire tank looks like it's vibrating when the hermits and the emeralds get wind of the food, and the snails are actually not slow! LOL
We also discovered we have two feather dusters in the tank. Both are very small, but growing. One is a bluish green, and attached to a piece of coral. It's been there a while. The other is in the sand just below one of the rocks. It looks white or cream colored and has dark red or brown spots on the feathers.....I wonder what else is in the tank we haven't discovered yet!?