Tank Entry

Day in and day out, I watch the anemones open up wide and close down into a ball that resembles rolled up socks. They seem to be happy, and the clownfish swim through all of them, except for the new Sebae anemone. That particular anemone has been crawling around looking for a nice sunny spot, but wasn't successful. The bubble tip anemones dominate the rockwork and shade it far too much.

I watched it closely to see how things were going to develop, but finally decided the best choice ...

On 6/10, the tank turned seven months old. Which means fresh pictures, right? I've been doing some necessary maintenance to clean up the system because I prefer it that way, but also because Gary Parr is coming to visit and asked specifically to photograph my reef. All the Vortechs are clean, the viewing panels are spotless, the overflow scraped down to the glossy black acrylic once more. The reef is ready.

I see blue polyps in this montipora, and some interesting rootlike veins. ...

No reef is ever perfect, no matter how much you want it to be. One thing declines as another improves. Here are some examples from yesterday:

Declining: These Blastos were happy, but now the right side is dying off. Could be the vermetid snail beneath (bright pink thing on the right), or the sponge that appears to be growing between the sclerites of the coral. I'll have to pull it loose and scrape away the sponge and have a run at that vermetid as well.

...

Just a simple comparison shot of the reef from January to May 2014.

Two things have happened for the past three days. The first one was the Sebae anemone decided to move from a perfectly nice spot to a newer option. I was told it would try to put its foot deep into the sandbed and down the bottom panel of the tank, but I guess that never happened. I had tried to move the sand out of the way, but obviously not sufficiently for it to allow it to finish the assigned task. Instead it decided ...