First time Fish parent - HELP - did not go so well .

[New2Fish]

A little backstory, my brother-in-law had a clown fish (not sure the type) in a large tank. He was an irresponsible fish parent and allowed the tank to remain dirty for an extended period of time (upwards of 9 months since its last cleaning.) Recently, he moved and was unable to take the fish with him, so he decided to (without checking with us) gift the fist to my daughter. We did some research and thought we had things figured out prior to bringing the fish home.

We purchased a smaller tank and salt water friendly sand, and thought we had the correct mixture to make salt water (there are virtually no places local to me that have salt water aquarium supplies or water,) however, sadly, the fish did not make it through the night. I began reading more and more forums and am having a hard time determining where we went wrong for Nemo to parish that quickly (less that 12 hours.)

My husband is devastated, and very upset feeling like he killed the fish, so I'm trying to figure out if it could have been a result of poor Nemo's previous living conditions being so disgusting and dirty, and uprooting him to a fresh clean new home. Would it have been a "culture shock," maybe he had become adjuster to living in those conditions after so long and then being thrown into a new environment so quickly. We did move some of the old tank water with him, but due to how gross it was did not take a lot, after reading today, I have realized that was most likely not a great idea and we probably should have retained more of his old water. Thanks for your help.

If anyone has any suggestions regarding being a first time fish/aquarium owner, that would be helpful - most likely we will have to replace Nemo for the child

[torque6]

The recommended salt water tank is usually 3 feet. Small and nano tanks have very high upkeep. Not easy to maintain.

Salt water fish is also harder to keep versus your fresh water fish like guppies.

Old water from old tank unfortunately means nothing. The importance of seeding a tank with bacteria is the biomedia in the old tank. But if you did not do so at this stage, those bacteria would have already died.

Do note that this hobby requires some sense of patience and you can't rush certain things, it is also quite unforgiving in a sense that making errors usually result in fish death.

If you are still keen, you can read up on cycling a fish tank first. Likewise, SGreef is a good forum for seeking helps from experts for keeping salt water fish.

[torque6]

By the way, seeing that your brother-in-law was able to keep 1 clown fish in a tank for 9 months isn't exactly irresponsible. For a large tank and having little bioload, he does not need to clean his tank every month. I speculate that he only need to do partial water changes every 2-3 months. His existing biomedia would have built up a large amount of bacteria to deal with ammonia and nitrite, keeping the water chemistry stable. Nemo was happy in his tank. Dirty tank is pretty subjective in my opinion.