brwiley

How about some details of your equipment?
Tank size?
Lighting?
Flow?
water parameters?

But in general, mushrooms thrive with lower light levels and higher nitrates. Since I upgraded my lighting a year ago, my mushrooms have been slowly disappearing. My LPS's are thriving.

I would frag all those mushrooms and sell them to your LFS for store credit.

I totally feel your pain. Mushrooms can get around. I myself have the same issue with Red Mushrooms. Drives me nuts. The only solution to mushroom over take that I have come up with is... going with the flow LOL. Think I may just get some blue and some green and just let em fight for the space. Have myself a little mushroom garden.

I agree, take your problem mushrooms and turn them into something. Make a little profit if you can or find out how many you have and give them away. Probably a lot of people that would have no problem paying shipping to get some for themselves. Might be some work to get them out of the tank but even if you only get a couple bucks would be better than just throwing it away.

I for one would enjoy a little shroom garden, have a few zoa's and a leather so far.

I'd be willing to swap some red for green! I have green w\ white stripes and frilly lavender also!

In a way that's the beauty of mushroom corals, they're REALLY easy to care for. They don't need the flow or the uber lighting and with a large variety of color variants you could actually have a very nice look. My mushroom situation arose out of bad maintenance and old worn out lower wattage bulbs. As Alaska_Phil said, nitrates and low lighting.

Thank you all for the feedback!
My Setup details:
Tank: 65gal (36”L x 18”W x 24” H), 16 gal sump (24”L x 12” W x 14” H)
Lighting: Coralife Aqualight Pro w/ 1 x 150W HM & 2 x 65W CFL
Flow: GenX PCX40 external return pump (~1000 gpm, but throttled down) & 2 x Vortech MP10w

Now that you mention it, it’s probably been 12 month or more since I last changed out the bulbs (shame on me for losing track of time, but it’s amazing how much you miss when you add a baby to your life!), so I’ll need to resolve that pronto.

Currently my nitrates and phosphate are very low, but that’s not to say things hadn’t gotten away from me at some point in the past to make conditions more favorable to the mushrooms. I’ve had a couple of episodes in the last 12 months where the majority of snails and hermits in my cleanup crew all seem to eat it at the same time, so I suspect that either that was the result of a chemistry imbalance or directly resulted in one.

I suppose I could try and frag these guys out… I’ll post a picture to illustrate the scope of the problem…

Mushroom Kingdom...

Your rocks are kinda overgrown but with some fragging and getting some other things growing I bet that you can get things going. If it's been a year on lighting change I can imagine that the bulbs do need changing but everything does seem pretty bright in the photo's, though you should gain more lighting in the correct spectrum which should help.

If you do decide to thin out your kingdom let me know as I wouldn't mind having a few. I have a couple good spots where they would be nice in my tank.

Thanks for the offer NightShade. I'm going to be doing something to thin them out and ideally it won't be destructive so I'll keep you posted.

As I'm looking at my existing lighting I'm wondering if it isn't time for wholesale replacement. The fixture is pushing 8 years old now. I replaced the CF ballast about 2 years ago, but I've never done anything with the MH ballast... anyone have an idea of the expected life span of a magnetic ballast? It's not the greatest all-in-one fixture in the world anyway, so I've been thinking about putting together a set of T5's and single Mogul MH. However I'm lacking the knowledge on where to begin on the design and construction of a piecemeal light setup. Any good links would be appreciated.

Check out www.hellolights.com. They have nice lighting. ;-)

If you want to remove the mushrooms and assure they don't come back, try this.

You'll need a sharp razor blade or two, some kalk powder (mixed with enough water to make it toothpaste consistency), and a syringe (kid's medicine syringes work wonderfully).

Go through systematically and slice each mushroom off as close to the base as possible. As you may know, mushrooms can be easily propagated this way. The top you slice off will heal over and be able to foot itself somewhere again, and the base left behind will grow into a new mushroom. You want to avoid the base growing back, so after you cut the top off coat the base with the kalk mixture. It should basically "burn" away the base of the mushroom over the course of a week or so.

As a side note, the kalk mixture is very basic, and can affect your water chemistry if you put too much into the tank at one time. I'd say doing half a rock at a time should be relatively safe. You also want to make sure you only kalk things you want to die. You certainly don't want to accidentally kill off your prized zoas!!!

I actually got a set of icecap t-5 retrofits for my tank. The biggest problem I have had with them is that if you don't have a lot of air moving over the bulbs to keep them cool they burn out quick. I was using 3 80 x 80 pc fans and that was not enough air so i dropped in a set of 120 x 120 24 volt fans designed to cool a cabinet rack and the bulbs are looking good so far. . . already outlasted the previous setup.

If I was to do another tank I would likely either go with the t-5's or a 250 watt 14k hamilton metal halide. The t-5's are nice but a 22 inch bulb costs the same as a 46 inch bulb, so even though my lights are shorter they are just as costly to replace. . . 23.00 per bulb and 4 bulbs and a single 250 watt hamilton would run about 85 with no special handling. Hopefully I start to get lucky enough that the t-5's last like they should.

LED's would be nice but the initial cost just doesn't seem to be quite right yet but maybe as a DIY project.