white feces?

[lovethesalt]

A freind of mine is starting out his first reef tank and has been doing fine so far. He recently purchased a coral beauty which when i first saw him 1 day after he bought him i did not think he was acting appropriate. Sure enough 2 days later he had long white feces and by the next day died. Any ideas? thank you in advance i would like to be more pepared in the future if such a thing happened again.

[billsreef]

There are a couple of possible reasons for long white feces, one is internal protozoan infections and the other is the sloughing of the intestinal lining in response to prolonged starvation on the way from reef to hobbiest. This last one is common in poorly handled (from the exporter side of things) fish and death usually follows within 1-2 days of this observation, IMO the this is the most likely scenario for what happened to your friends fish. That used to be blamed on cyanide collection but the same researchers that originally proposed sloughing of the intestinal lining as a symptom of cyanide later determined that it was actually prolonged (over 2 weeks) starvation that caused it.