A while ago we tried a yellow tang in our tank. Went around our very young tank cleaning up all the algae it could find and thrived the first couple of weeks. Then it started to reduce its eating until it stopped completely. And then....yup, toes up in the bottom of the tank one morning.

After a suitable grieving period I decided to investigate further and did a wee autopsy and found its stomach relatively full with a HUGE (compared to the size of the tang) hair ball. Picture attached. The picture is after extraction of hair ball and it being rinsed in water!

Lesson - keep our hands/arms and anything else out of the tank that could introduce hair/fur/stuff that fish like tangs could mistake for hair algae! Looking back, during rock/coral rearranging I used to regularly wipe my arms with a towel. Obviously (now) a great way to introduce hair (human and cat/dog/carpet) on wet arms. :oops:

that's amazing

didnt someone else have this problem a little while ago? did autopsy etc

yes it was rossco :oops:

Thanks for that info - that is bad luck waiting to happen

very interesting.