Candy Cane feeding, or hitchiker

[PaulBuxton]

Ok feeling a little silly. I thought I had seen my candy cane feeding, but a quick view of some videos of candy cane feeding (watched during my lunch break at work) suggests that I must be looking at something else.

Here is a video I took

<https://www.flickr.com/photos/captain_chickenpants/14782796267/>

and here is someone elses video of Candy Canes feeding.

 

I will be looking more closely when I get home!

Anyone any thoughts?

 

 

 

[joy13]

I have one that feeds like that all the time it is the fastest growing one, my others don't send out feeder tentacles nearly as much.

[PaulBuxton]

Was that in reference to the youtube video, or the one I uploaded to flickr?

[Mariaface]

What you have is a barnacle; it's filter feeding. Generally harmless unless they have too much food and populations rise to plauge proportions. But usually, they don't even last long in the average tank.

 

Do you broadcast feed the tank? The candy cane coral would probably appreciate solid chunks of food set against its feeding tentacles (you may have luck feeding after lights out until you can train it to respond to food during the day).

[PaulBuxton]

Thanks!

 

Yes at the moment I turn of my filter and sprinkle a (singular) flake for my clown fish.

When it is done eating (the flake is quite big!) I turn the pump on a bit to get the rest of the flake to sink and distribute. My hermit crab, peppermint shrimp, and sometimes the snails, then race to see who can get to the remainders first.

My phosphate level is a little bit high so I might try dropping to every other day feeding schedule.

I will also keep my eyes peeled to see if I can see the tentacles in the evening, not seen them at all so far, had the coral just over a week.

[Mariaface]

Hmm... Can you tell me about how big the tank is, what filtration looks like, etc?

 

Flake foods are known for disintegrating quickly, so that could have something to do with your phosphate levels. You might want to try a small pellet food, like New Life Spectrum or Fauna Marin (they make soft clownfish pellets that mine go ballistic for). Pellets hold on to their nutritional value in the water longer than flakes do, so your fish will thank you.

 

The coral, on the other hand, might not appreciate the flakes as real food. Do you feed a variety or anything? There are tons and tons of different foods for corals! Simple ones might be PE mysis, chopped squid/clam/scallop, etc. My candy cane coral happily takes the clowns' Fauna Marin pellets, too. And because I don't have enough corals to warrant a cube of food, I stopped by the seafood aisle and gathered a bunch of fresh ingredients to chop up and put into a flat ziplock bag. One clam, one mussel, one scallop, some squid, some tiny prawn eggs, etc. Cut the pieces up super tiny (you could use a food processor), added Vita-Chem, Selcon, phytoplankton, cyclopeeze, clownfish pellets, and a few drops of garlic supplement. When I go to feed, I just break off a tiny chunk. Everything in the tank goes crazy for it, and I so far feed it twice a week. Again, not enough corals to warrant broadcast feeding and my filter feeders seem happy with the phytoplankton in the mix and the couple of drops I add in the morning when I feed the clowns.

[PaulBuxton]

Hi,

The tank is a 30 litre (8G) nano cube. The filter is behind a partiion at the back, it has 2 grades of filter media foam (no carbon or other chemical filtration). The tank has a protein skimmer as well.

At the moment I have just been broadcast feeding the flake, but I have some pellets on order, and some frozen food I was going to try spot feeding.

 

I like the thought of pellets better than the flake anyway so will definatly be trying them.

[PaulBuxton]

Just attempted to spot feed the coral with some frozen mysis, my clown fish wouldn't let me get the food anywhere near the coral! It practically ripped my tweezers out of y hand! I need to get something else for spot feeding like this, worried the fish will hurt itself on tweezers.

[Mariaface]

Clowns will be clowns! You can give it some of the mysis to distract it, then feed the coral and defend it against other food-stealers.

[hey]

I prefer to feed hikari mysis to lps using a long turkey baster type feed tube, keeps the clowns off of it while i baste my corals.

[Mariaface]

I wish that worked for me! I use a 22" glass pipette, and the clowns will chase the food all the way down. Even if the food gets to the coral first, they have no qualms about swimming right up to it and stealing the food, which can be damaging to the coral if it's hanging on particularly hard.

[ChickenoftheC]

I loveeee barnacles. I have red, orange and white and maroon ones in my tank. Id love yellow ones.

[Mariaface]

Lucky! I've only got the grey-ish ones.

[jservedio]

Feed your fish and get them fat and happy before feeding your corals if you do it all at once. Or wait until the lights have been out for an hour or two and your clowns will be fast asleep and your coral ready to eat. The clowns will obviouslly start to wake up if you turn the lights on to feed, but they take 5 or 10 minutes to fully wake up - which will give your corals plenty of time to envelop the food.

 

When target feeding corals, make sure you are turning off all of your pumps. After they grab the food you can turn all of the pumps back on except the return to keep the food suspended and let anything that didn't get a chance to eat grab something from the WC. After 15 minutes or so you can turn the return pump back on.

 

If you leave the return pump on while feeding, the vast majority of your food will end up in your filtration rotting and dumping nutrients into your water.

 

Investing in a variety of good foods will be the best bang-for-the-buck investment you can make on your tank. Pellets and Mysis are good for the fish and larger LPS, Baby Brine, Nutramar Ova (prawn eggs), and Oyster Eggs are good for some SPS and smaller LPS, blender mush (LRS, Rods, Limpets, etc.) contains a good variety of particle sizes and is good for everything if you don't want a freezer full of food.

[PaulBuxton]

Thanks guys, some useful info here.

After realising that the coral isn't feeding (instead what I was seeing was the barnacle) and doing more browsing etc. I have come to realise that the heads are not really doing much at all, they have never inflated as far as I have seen. I have seen a spionid worm on the head as well as the now identified barnacle. I am suspecting that these are perhaps irritating the coral and causing it to not inflate/feed, so I think I will try and get rid of them. A dab of superglue seems like the standard approach...

[Mariaface]

Thanks guys, some useful info here.

After realising that the coral isn't feeding (instead what I was seeing was the barnacle) and doing more browsing etc. I have come to realise that the heads are not really doing much at all, they have never inflated as far as I have seen. I have seen a spionid worm on the head as well as the now identified barnacle. I am suspecting that these are perhaps irritating the coral and causing it to not inflate/feed, so I think I will try and get rid of them. A dab of superglue seems like the standard approach...

 

Are you sure they're irritating it? How do you feed the candy cane? Try gently dropping some frozen food (mysis, ova, squid, etc) onto each polyp after lights out. Remember to keep the pumps off for a few of minutes while the coral latches onto the food. Candy canes generally start off only extending their tentacles and feeding at night, so a lot of people need to train them into eating during the day.

[PaulBuxton]

My concern is that not only does it not feed, but it doesn't seem to inflate at all. I will try again feeding it after lights out this evening

[Mariaface]

Ah. What are your parameters? Mine tends to get upset if alk is low, and will refuse to eat. I'm solving that issue now, though (alk stability is measured in spans of six months, not weeks, unfortunately), and it's eating anything I pass it (the seafood mix, mysis shrimp, clown pellets, blah blah blah). It even tries for pieces that are way too big for it, sometimes.

 

Anyway, hopefully it feeds tonight!

[PaulBuxton]

Hmm,

I think it was about 8dKH when I last checked, but that was with a paper test strip and I am not sure how accurate they are, I shall do another test with my 'proper' test kit.

I don't yet have a magnesium test kit (it is in the post) so don't know what that is at.

 

Ammonia, Nitrate and Nitrate were all at 0

Phosphate 0.25 ish (difficult to be accurate with the gradients in the colour chart). As I mentioned earlier a little high. I have some phosphate remover in the post as well as going to adjust feeding.

Calcium 420ppm

Salinity 1.024 SG

Ph 8.2

[Mariaface]

Careful with removing too much phosphate too quickly; I just did that and LPS do not appreciate being nutrient starved. If you're going to run really low phosphates, make sure to feed the corals a lot in order to make up for it.

 

Alk should be fine around 8dKH, so long as it's stable.

[PaulBuxton]

OK, got home from work yesterday and the coral was nice and puffy :-)

At night it seems to close up again. I guess it just needed a bit more time to settle in!

[Mariaface]

Ah, I see, new addition. How long have you had it?

[PaulBuxton]

Yes.

Everything is a bit new to be honest :-)

Had the candy cane nearly 2 weeks now.

[Mariaface]

Good to hear that it's acclimating nicely! Pretty soon it'll be eating you out of house and home, trust me. xD