melev

My reef turns nine months old today and some thoughts about the past few weeks.




To start off, I'd like to showcase some of the newest additions.

Here's the Branching Tubastrea, usually called a black suncoral. You can see the tissue is dark green. Each night the polyps come out so I can spot feed them.



And while I'm talking about this species, here's another type about to get a meal.




At the Customer Appreciation Day at Fish2morow, I picked up a couple of nice sized corals, an A. efflorescens...



... and an A. milleopora (peach colored).




I added a pair of Pom Pom crabs to the frag tank for personal entertainment. They are both tiny and elusive, for now.



I've been battling the infestation of Acropora Eating Flatworms (AEFW) for the past month. Originally I found one on a chewed upon coral, but when blowing off a very pale coral I released about a hundred into the entire reef. I thought it was tissue at first glance, but as I watched them suck into the nearby pump and then blast toward all my corals I realized what just happened. Each day, I take a turkey baster and blow off most of the SPS corals in the tank. As the AEFW fly off, my Lyretail Anthias are happy to devour them right out of the water column. It's a good system that is working out well, something we used to do together in the 280g as well.

I pulled out a few loose corals today and dipped them in Ultra Pest Control (Fauna Marin) to knock off a few more since I was dipping the newest arrivals from the LFS. What I've observed over the past 14 days is that corals that were pale and unhappy are coloring up again. One was beige and has turned lavendar, heading toward the purple color is is supposed to be. The large Mille is very pale still, but it was heavily infested and had suffered the most.




I'm feeding the fish often. There was about 75 in my reef when I counted two weeks ago, but I lost about three more since then. A Lawnmower Blenny, a Sherbert Anthias and another Chromis. I believe there are 25 Chromis currently.










I noticed this some time back. If you leave Valonia alone to grow, it ends up resembling a flower. You may be able to make out a few of these "flowers" in the image below. My frag tank is packed with Valonia and some type of smoky-wispy-stringy brown algae (that I siphon out weekly). There are two emerald crabs in the tank but I think I need 5 more.