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Well, it looks like my sexing problems with German Blue Rams are over, because the one that nobody could figure out is now very, very sick. He/she won't eat, all the coloration is fading to a sort of ashen dark gray, and the little guy must be feeling really bad because very little motivates him to swim, and he can't even hold proper orientation in the water. He tends to accidentally swim sideways or even backwards. I do notice he's still capable of moving, but he tends to sit on the bottom and do nothing. I don't think he's even eaten. There aren't any obvious signs other than behavior and loss of color.

I retested water conditions yesterday and ammonia and nitrites are fine. I haven't directly checked nitrates but I did a 25% on Friday and nitrates were 10ppm before the change. pH is, and has always been, 7.6, which is high for Rams but I've also seen that other people have had success with them at this pH level. Hardness was fairly low last time I checked but pH hasn't dropped or anything.

Recent large change:

On Saturday I did some light planting. I got two fairly large Amazon swords, some hornwort, and switched to 30 watts of Triton fluorescents. Planting these involved a sizable bit of gravel disturbance, leaving the water clouded with debris for a few hours.

Nothing else in the tank shows any signs of distress at all except for the other Ram, who sometimes shows reduced coloration. Since she's just as willing to eat as before, and is even now looking to the top as well as the bottom to eat, I think she's more or less okay.

Possible explanations:

pH is too high, stressing the fish
The plants or even the snail had a disease that the Rams are susceptible to.
The cloud of gravel debris poisoned them because the bacterial colony was temporarily unable to keep up
The rams came with a disease - I got them mail-order in blue water, so this is a possibility
The rams were raised in medicated water under unusual conditions, making them less hardy

Or all of the above, in combination.

So what do I do now?

Most rams that are kept in 7.0+ PH and survive are raised locally and have adapted over time. I'm guessing though, your rams were raised in the proper 5-6ppm PH lvl. You should always find out the water parameters of the fish you buy were raised in before purchasing. Especially if you want to put them into a water habitat not normally recommended for them.

I think your best bet will be to slowly lower the PH. But other than that, sometimes you just get sick fish. So try your best and hope it works!

Sometimes the commericial pH lowering chemicals do not work, a safe, natural way to lower the pH on your tank (and the hardness as well), is to add some peat to your filter. As the water circulates through the peat, the pH will go down. I hope your ram starts to feel better!

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And when he gets to Heaven, to Saint Peter he will tell: "One more Marine reporting, Sir! I've served my time in Hell."

I'm sorry to say that he passed away the same day as my post. I got a different one from a LFS, and the water there is 7.5 (they have a tank full of six or seven Rams and maybe a couple of hatchetfish). So far this one's been okay.

I've considered pH-lowering options, and it's kind of rough. I don't want to switch back from Python to buckets, and dropping 5 gallons of pH 7.5 into 15 of pH 6.5 doesn't seem like a good idea.