Had to be there reefer moment

[pineo]

Have you ever had one of those "had to be there" moments with your reef tank?

 

For example, tonight I watched a porcelain anemone crab wrestle a bristle worm for a one piece of krill. I have no photo, no movie - you just had to be there to see it. The worm was able to wrench the food out of the crabs claws - the whole ordeal lasted about two minutes.

 

Its one of those special moments between a reefer and their aquarium....hahaha

 

Anyone else experience a "had to be there" moment with their reef? I would love to hear about it!

[speakyourmind]

i had a hermit crab tumble his ass down from a high up piece of live rock in my tank once, was pretty funny.

[Kraylen]

I have a little orange ball nem who shares a hole with a bristleworm and they fight over mysis all the time.

[johnsredline]

When i feed mysis to my coral and clowns, some gets sucked into the overflow on my aquapod, and the male clown will jump over the overflow to eat all the food getting sucked in. Then jump back to the display after theres no more food.

 

Hes been doing it constantly for the past few months. its pretty funny to watch

[Mr. Green]

I had a sexy shrimp haul a recently deceased damsel from the sand to the top of my LR pile. He was like 1/8th the size. Strong little buggers.

[Nosey]

lol...That's funny stuff, you should try and get some video!

[el fabuloso]

Two nights ago I got in a huge fight with my emerald crab. I was feeding the sexy shrimps when out comes the emerald crab trampling over everything like a rhino. He has a bad habit of holding on to the tongs and not letting go and did just that and ended up knocking a bunch of corals over. I was so mad I yanked him out with the tongs and was dangling for a while until he slipped and fell on the carpet. Then he started running away so I had to chase him with the tongs. He put up a good fight and held on to the carpet so it was hard for me to nab him. This chase probably went on for a good three minutes until I finally managed to flip him on his back so I could easily pick him up. Needless to say he's still in the fuge living in exile.

[er1c_the_reefer]

i had this huge sallylite foot crab in my tank that i got when it was a 1.5" baby. it grew to about 4" across. one day i found this juvenile atlantic blue tang (my favorite tang) at an lfs that was healthy and eating well. historically, i've had horrible luck with atl blue tangs and this one was no different. i took it home and acclimated it. as soon as i put it in the tank, the sallylite foot crab comes out of the rock work and launches itself at the tang and speared it with one of its leg. it was really one of those moments where you had to tear down your rock work to spear a crab.

[yardboy]

I bought a rose anemone from a local reefer which was hosting an ocellaris clown. I had a much smaller aquacultured Occellaris that I decided to introduce to the tank as well, but he was very shy of the anemone, having never seen one, and they are not natural hosts. Well, the already hosting clown would just grab the other by the pelvic fins and drag him into the anemone. After a day of that the smaller one was happily wallowing around like he'd been there for years.

[MR.FEESH]

A while back I had a hermit that was runnin' round butt naked behind my rock work. He came out a lot, but never enough for me to get a good picture. He lived like a freelance hermit should.

[Nick's Reef]

I used to have a pair of Yasha gobies and a pistol, the pistol would clean the gobies like a cleaner shrimp. I think i got a pic once, but it was fun to watch him crawl onto the gobies back and clean them. They'd also (gobies) beat the sh!t out fo my clowns, not to the point of me getting worried but it was quite funny, when the male got some food, one of the gobies would charge at him and grap him in his mouth while the other stole food from it's mouth. It happed almost everyday when i fed them, but only lasted awhile since the yashas got full very quickly.

[shutterbuggy]

I had this porcelain crab who was fearless. It would stay out in the open fanning for food day and night. However it was very territorial. Anything that came near it it would attack. So on occasion I would see it pick up a hermit and throw it like a football, with very little (if any) disruption to its fanning for food. Very funny to watch!

[lakshwadeep]

I used to have a goby/pistol shrimp (a large tiger pistol, not the randall's) pair. Since I like macroalgae, I decided to get some shaving brush algae after seeing them in dapellegrini's tank. When I was picking mine out, the LFS guy said that there were two "heads" and he'd let me pay for only one if I promised to give another back. I was excited about how the shaving brush was growing so well in my sand, but soon I heard some clicking sounds in the night. I found the crafty pistol had chopped down the shaving brush and dragged it into its burrow. I waited a long time before going to that LFS.

[CheeseHead]

A while back I caught my 2 red leg hermits....well....gettin frisky in my tank.... A week or so later I see the smaller of the two climbing out of it's shell and gyrating for about 2 min......I thought "That's strange....almost like it was having a seizure" The next thing I knew there were TONS of little hermit babies shooting out of the gyrating hermits shell, just a non stop outpour of tiny little organisms for like 45 seconds straight. I've NEVER seen my Gobies as happy to eat as they were that day, they probably ate every single one of the little guys......No pics or video..had to be there

[aaron1987]

My jawfish, being the territorial little bugger he is, doesn't take kindly to hermits wandering around. One day he was carrying out his standard excavation and cleaning of his hole when he spotted a hermit a few inches above him on the rockwork... he grabbed a mouthful of sand, swam up and stared the hermit down for a few seconds and then spit the sand onto the hermit who immediately let go and tumbled down the rockwork. I couldn't help but think BOOM! HEADSHOT!

[BKtomodachi]

My snails are bipolar. They.... erm... "spew" their reproductive juices into the water perhaps every 2-3 weeks. The next day, they are attempting to kill themselves by smashing their faces into my vortech propeller, so hard you can hear it smacking them.

[Sexy Shrimp]

I have a hermit who climbs the coraline on the back wall, gets to the top and falls. Then starts all over again! I always swore that it would starve to death or get trapped but it never did. It is now my only her mit bizarrely!

 

Today my male YWG came out of his lair with a ball of eggs and began releasing the larvae. All the fish chowed down like mad but as soon as the larvae were all gone the other fish got all randy and started doing mating dances! I guess fish get broody too

[pineo]

haha this thread is full of funny stories - stuff only reefers could appreciate:)

[Reef Chicks]

I usually frag mushrooms onto empty shells. I had a bunch of blue legged crabs in my tank and apparently one of them decided he needed a new home, so he took to an empty shell that had a superman mushroom on it. It was a pretty funny sight to see a mushroom moving all over the tank (it was a pico, so literally, he moved all over). Eventually the crab changed homes again and left my poor mushroom alone.

[brian92]

So I was doing a water change, my little percula clownfish starts nipping at the siphon hose in the tank, Then "wooosh" clown get sucked up by the hose!!! The little orange blurr travels through about ten feet of hose and ends up in the wc bucket!!! I scoop him out and put him back in the tank good and he was good as new.

 

Named him Augustus

[clownfish1124]

haha this thread is full of funny stories - stuff only reefers could appreciate:)

reefers are nerds.

 

 

my funniest story was at the lfs. two workers were trying to catch a tang, but it was smarter. it actually jumped into the adjacent tank and the workers started chasing a different one stupid lfs!

[Whacked]

sorta like el fab's but not a reef story.

 

I like african dwrf frogs. They are pretty cool and aside from being the only truely aquatic frogs (live their lives entirely underwater), they are less than a inch in size.

 

Well, I picked up a couple more ADF's. when it was time to put them in with the others one decided to leap from my hand onto the carpet. good thing is they dont jump very well but this little guy could move! also played heck as I didnt want to hurt him when I finally grabbed the bugger.

He gave me a good chase tho.

[buckeyes2k7]

The look on my face daily as I look into my tank and see my pulsing xenia taking over all of my lr, you just have to be there to see it

[Chebon]

I've had two such moments in my tank:

 

First was when my sexy shrimp attacked and ate a small blue leg hermit. I was already watching because I'd noticed the hermit trading up to a larger cerith shell. At first I thought the hermit was attacking a live snail so I was watching closely, but it was an empty shell. I kept watching because I was already interested... I noticed my sexy (Sidney) slowly stalking up to the hermit, shaking her junk with each slow short step. Sidney made it up to about an inch away from the hermit and stopped... waiting... watching while the hermit finished preparing its new home. When the hermit started to make the switch she struck. It happened too fast to give you a play by play but within a split second Sidney had torn that hermit away from both shells and carried it half way across the tank in what looked like two swift motions. A couple more swift moves and the hermit's butt end was laying on the sand bed and Sidney stood above it on a rock eating the torn open end of a still (hopelessly) fighting hermit. The hermit lived for a surprisingly long time clawing at open water, unable to reach the predator eating it alive.

 

The second was just last week and I'm still trying to find out what kind of worm did it. I had just dropped in a little bit of cyclop-eeze and zooplanktos-l to get all my suns and dendros to open when I noticed this decent sized (1 1/2" maybe 1/4" think) bristle worm coming out of the rockwork in back. I didn't think much of it and went on about my feeding routine, put in a little chunk of mysis and squid then wait for everything to open. I came back about 10-15 minutes later to see if things had opened and saw this odd worm poking out of the rockwork and "standing" above the bristle worm with a posture kind of like a cobra's! It had at least an inch out of the rock and was probably no more than 1/8" thick. It was this beautiful green-blue color and was pretty bright. That greenish worm slowly bent forward and bit into the midsection of the bristle worm and lifted it up. The bristle curled up in circles around the attacking worm and the green worm pulled it all the way into the rock.

 

I could go on and on about some of the amazing things I've seen in the Caribbean or Hawaii... the day I followed a sea turtle around oahu for hours and ended up having to hitchhike back to the hotel and the encounter with a massive moray that day. Or the forest if long spined urchins I nearly got impaled on by strong currents off Jamaica and the half dozen or so puffers I pissed off when I grabbed an algae covered buoy rope to take a rest when I finally made it back to calmer waters. The very curious and privacy invading crabs of St Croix...

[veshman]

it was pretty cool seeing my pompom crab trying to pounce on passing snails from a cliff... that stage ended fast though.

 

Also fun seeing a confused, naked hermit trying to attach to a shell 5x as large as he was.