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Tinitanks 5gal pico, The Alcove (thread currently under construction)


Tired

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Yeah, yours was obviously one of the ones that eats things we don't want. There are a lot of different kinds of polyclads, that eat all sorts of things, and they're one of those groups that's hard to sort into species without very close inspection. 

 

If it was me, I might have put it in a bucket with an airstone, and tried to feed it a chunk of shrimp. You could find a taker for a big polyclad that could be fed frozen food, I bet. Or, hell, keep it yourself, it's not like they'd need much space. Just a rock to live in and enough water for it to not instantly go bad when the worm got fed.

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8 minutes ago, Tired said:

Yeah, yours was obviously one of the ones that eats things we don't want. There are a lot of different kinds of polyclads, that eat all sorts of things, and they're one of those groups that's hard to sort into species without very close inspection. 

 

If it was me, I might have put it in a bucket with an airstone, and tried to feed it a chunk of shrimp. You could find a taker for a big polyclad that could be fed frozen food, I bet. Or, hell, keep it yourself, it's not like they'd need much space. Just a rock to live in and enough water for it to not instantly go bad when the worm got fed.

I don't have space in my 374 square foot studio apartment for snail murderers! There's barely enough for two humans and two cats as it is.

 

On a more serious note, it was ripped in half when sucked out of the tank. And while, I've read they can actually survive that pretty handily, I felt better just placing it in the freezer.

 

I'll admit, if would be really interesting (if not slightly disturbing) to see a tank dedicated to one. I imagine identifying individual species to be difficult though!

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Oh, two cats, fun. Have you ever tried a puzzle feeder? We got ours this ball toy/feeder recently, basically just a ball with a lid that has holes for the food to fall out. One's ambivalent, one likes the ball a lot. I fill it with dry food and a few bits of freeze-dried fish meat. 

 

You don't necessarily need to ID them down to species to keep. You just have to know what it eats. Hell, you don't have to know the species of anything- we just use the species name to find out what the thing wants, instead of trial-and-error.

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25 minutes ago, Tired said:

Oh, two cats, fun. Have you ever tried a puzzle feeder? We got ours this ball toy/feeder recently, basically just a ball with a lid that has holes for the food to fall out. One's ambivalent, one likes the ball a lot. I fill it with dry food and a few bits of freeze-dried fish meat. 

 

You don't necessarily need to ID them down to species to keep. You just have to know what it eats. Hell, you don't have to know the species of anything- we just use the species name to find out what the thing wants, instead of trial-and-error.

Good point on the care requirements - I doubt we know the exact species of many things kept in a reef tank.

 

The cats are clicker trained to do tricks for their freeze-dried fish. Neither has showed interest in the square puzzle box toy we have, but I'm sure at least one of them would love a puzzle ball. The other is smart enough to know he just needs to goad me into giving him a high five - hard to leave the cute little guy hanging

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I sure as hell don't know the species of any of my zoanthids. They don't care, though. I have a goby where I'm pretty sure of the exact species, but only because, out of three basically-identical ones, it's the species that's most often captive-bred. At least exact zoanthid or goby species doesn't make a difference here. With flatworms, it's different- who knows what some of these eat. And it's made worse by the fact that we have absolutely no idea how many flatworms there actually are. Same goes for all microfauna. For all we know, we both have something in our tanks that doesn't have a scientific name yet. 

 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0018CG40O/ref=twister_B0028RXATQ?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1

This is what we got. You have to put some good treats in at first to teach them how to use it. Both of ours understand how it works, but one of them cries until you tilt it for him, because he gets frustrated incredibly easily when food requires any effort. All he has to do is push it with his nose or paw, but noo. We're getting one of those stacked-dish things that they have to use their paw to pull the food out of, he already uses his paw to get food into better spots. 

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7 minutes ago, Tired said:

I sure as hell don't know the species of any of my zoanthids. They don't care, though. I have a goby where I'm pretty sure of the exact species, but only because, out of three basically-identical ones, it's the species that's most often captive-bred. At least exact zoanthid or goby species doesn't make a difference here. With flatworms, it's different- who knows what some of these eat. And it's made worse by the fact that we have absolutely no idea how many flatworms there actually are. Same goes for all microfauna. For all we know, we both have something in our tanks that doesn't have a scientific name yet. 

 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0018CG40O/ref=twister_B0028RXATQ?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1

This is what we got. You have to put some good treats in at first to teach them how to use it. Both of ours understand how it works, but one of them cries until you tilt it for him, because he gets frustrated incredibly easily when food requires any effort. All he has to do is push it with his nose or paw, but noo. We're getting one of those stacked-dish things that they have to use their paw to pull the food out of, he already uses his paw to get food into better spots. 

Yeah, funny how with highly specialized species it can be be make or break, nudibranchs being a good example, while with others it's a pretty much a nonfactor.

 

Now to pick which color treat ball to get...

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  • 4 weeks later...

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Built an amphipod trap to try. They aren't chewing on anything healthy, but they swarm any polyps that get stressed by something, and there are quite a lot of them. Hoping I can catch some out. 

 

Here's something I'm enjoying. I bought these as Rose Nebula palys. Not sure that's what they are, they don't look like other pictures, but they're pretty. The first picture is when I got them in December. The second is from a couple weeks ago, featuring a polyp I gave a mysis shrimp to, and the third is today. I think these are doing pretty well! I've placed some shards of frag discs around them, so when they spread, it'll be onto the disc and I can easily prune them to make frags. 

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Having some hair algae still. I'm trying to figure out the feeding schedule for things, so nutrients are a little high. I'm keeping it off of corals (except that one possibly Fruit Loops zoa frag that keeps getting algae on it again for some reason), and I added some snails. 

 

I need to update this thread. Been distracted by the whole pandemic thing. I'll work on it, probably. 

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I got some ricordeas! Boy, these things are pretty. They're in the corner on the left. I want to jiggle the fire fern around a bit and try to get it to stay up higher, but right now there isn't much space. I have a cup attached to the side of the tank, with a bleached anemone in it so my porcelain crab can't trample it. That's what you can see in the edges of the pics. Things will just have to be a bit tangled for now- good thing the rics don't seem to mind. I'm going to shift them around so they all have room to get a few inches wide, hopefully, 

Top-down pics of things in this tank seem to be a bit iffy on color for some reason. That side-view one is the best example of the color. 

They look so soft! I wish I could stick my hand in there and poke them, but I don't think anything involved in the matter would enjoy it. 

The aqua one in the back left is from ReefCleaners, and the green-and-purple in the front right is from Aquarium Depot. The other four are a steel blue, rainbow, orange, and 'oddball' from KP Aquatics. The oddball is pretty well hidden, front left, mostly under the macro right now. That's their listing for, essentially, "misc", and it's a light blue with a blue-purple rim. 

...I really shouldn't get any more of these, I don't have the space for them once they start splitting, but, boy. If I see a nice one locally, I might have to grab it. I wonder if I can find an orange one with a dark rim. 

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These two are the rainbow and orange ones, respectively. I asked if they could send an orange one with some blue in it, and boy did they send me one with some blue in it! Enough that it's more like an orange-inclined rainbow. Exactly the sort of thing I was hoping for.

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I figured out what the sympodium likes. It likes to be glued to the rock so nothing can move it around, and very lightly sprinkled with reef roids now and then. It's expanded really nicely, and I'm not entirely sure whether the feeding or the not-being-moved contributed more to that. This stuff hates being disturbed. Fair enough! I'd probably be annoyed too. 

Task Force the tiny goby is doing well, too. Still nice and fat. Hard to get a nice picture of, though, because he's decided that his new favorite place to live is under an overhang where I can't really see him. Oh well- he's still eating pods like I need him to. 

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NO clue why this green-yellow-and-brown paly was being sold as "cinnamon paly", but, hey, POTO probably knows what they're talking about. It's a cool coral, and it's what I ordered, they had a good picture, I just don't get the name. Oh well. This stuff should look impressive when I get a little cluster of it going. The base bulges kind of weirdly, not sure why it's like that. I thought it was a great deal of extra glue at first, but, no, it's soft and definitely made of coral flesh. The mat is doing something interesting, apparently. 

The one under the blue light is a Never Beast zoa. I can't take a nice pic of it under white lights, the metallic shine doesn't show up at all. It's sort of red and coppery under the whites, like it's made out of wire. Hope this one does well, I want a nice patch of it. 

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KP Aquatics sells zoanthids occasionally, and I grabbed a little frag when I ordered the ricordeas. I like this unnamed yellow-eyed critter. The long tentacles are fun. I haven't decided where to put them yet. Maybe over by the Captain Jerks that have a similar shape? Their color is a little lighter in person, but no less intense, just not as dark. If you happen to be ordering from KP, and they have these in stock, grab some! I think they might be the same species as the hornet zoanthids. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

You know how people usually have really pretty pics of their tanks up, where they've cleaned everything up all nice and neat? Here's the opposite of that.

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Quick picture I took to show the tank to a friend. Figured I'd toss it up here. Salt drips on the outside of the glass, algae on the inside. A few things out of place, and a bunch of glare from the empty hermit shells covering the substrate to find out what they like. And you know what? I think it looks nice anyway. It's not one of the front-page-picture tanks, but I like looking at it. It's a bit less of a rock wall effect in person, that empty area in the middle really helps. 

 

Still have some algae. Hopefully my new snails (including that giant nerite on the front glass, she's comically oversized but I like her) will clean some of that up for me. Most of the things in the tank are pretty happy, algae or no. The closed zoas here are mostly ones that were recently stepped on by something. 

The rics are all on pretty small bits of rubble (or on nothing), so I'm still shuffling them around a little now and then. They have a bunch of bits of rubble under them to spread onto, but are still easy to move. 

If you look near the center, there's a white sponge that's really taken off attached to the branched rock. It used to be in the upper right, but I'm not sure if it wanted more flow or less light, or what, because it didn't grow much up there. Now it's growing nice and fast. Which is cool! And concerning! Hopefully it's not a pest. At least it's fragile and should be easy to keep relatively contained. It makes a good structural element, and I know zoas will grow right around it because it came in on a zoa frag, so I plan to let it keep doing its thing until/unless it becomes an issue. I won't let it get to be a big mass, but a bit of it is nice. 

 

The pistol shrimp has been very busy! You can see her digs over there on the right, those piles of sand around the rock. She's pretty confident, since there are no big fish to scare her, so she'll come out of cover sometimes when I put food in. Here she is popping out a gap in the top of the rock, right by my Mohican Sunrise palys and their incredibly white frag plug, to investigate reef roids smell. I gave her a bit of mysis. Well, two- a big amphipod took the first bit before she noticed it. No idea if it's actually a female, but I don't think the shrimp cares what pronouns I use. I named her Gun, because it seemed like a funny name for a pistol shrimp. Like naming a dog Spot. 

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I got something neat in with my snail order; a heart mime crab. It's very small, carapace about the size of my pinky nail, and missing three legs. Pretty lively and entirely willing to explore that area, though. It was scared of the feeding tongs at first, then I fed the decorator crab near it, it got the smell, and it waved its claws around in a grabby motion until I gave it food also.

There's a good assortment of snails in the tank now. You can see some periwinkles and a dwarf cerith in the same picture as the crab, and that's a dwarf planaxis on the Florida cerith. I figure the best way to get algae and detritus out of all the little nooks and crannies is to have a load of little snails. And ReefCleaners has such a nice variety! I don't see the planaxis much, but it's nice when I spot them. The periwinkles I see intermittently, which is nice, they're pretty. The dwarf ceriths are less pretty, but RC sent me five million tiny babies last time I got some, so I have them visible all the time. Seriously, there are dozens of bitty babies in there. When they mature, I'll probably have to rehome a bunch, but oh well. 

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I named the big nerite Monolith, because why not. She pretty much always has snails on her. In this picture, it's dwarf ceriths and periwinkles. Must be some good stuff on that shell. 

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Porcelain crab is developing a "tan" of algae growing on the parts of its shell that aren't normally hidden by the anemone. This seems to be normal for the species, and gets shed when they molt. Most pics of them that I can find have some degree of algae on 'em. 

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A big bristleworm lives in the pistol shrimp's burrow now. She did me the favor of building a part of her burrow right up against the glass, and she's been using that area to stack every little bit of shell she pulls out of somewhere else. She doesn't seem to mind the bristleworm, which is weird.

She also molted, in a spot further to the right of this picture, where I can clearly see everything. I looked over and saw her lying on her side, twitching, and was worried for half a second before I remembered shrimp look weird when they molt. Looked away to Google pics of molting shrimp, looked back, and saw her sort of twitch violently and shoot right out of the empty shell. Pretty cool. SHe's a few millimeters longer now! It's not much, but it's visible. 

Oh, and I have a short video of her freaking out at a hair. I have long, fine hair, and I shed a lot, so it kinda gets everywhere. Including into my aquarium. Normally nothing seems to mind, but she tried to haul a hair through her burrow and out to her dumping grounds, couldn't get it loose from the entrance, and spent 10 minutes clicking almost nonstop as she tried to break it or otherwise get rid of it. I finally pulled it out with some tweezers myself, because she wasn't getting anywhere with it. And because it was loud as heck while she tried.

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I love these candid tank pics. I never realized it before I started my own pico earlier this year, but very small tanks are really hard to work in without causing at least a little bit of spillage. Those salt lines are a more or less permanent feature on my 4 gallon cube as well.

 

Love the tank, especially the pistol shrimp! Super weird that she is okay with a huge bristle worm hanging out in her hole (aren't they supposed to fight with those things? 🤔), but whatever works for her I guess. The new Ricordea look excellent as well, with good expansion. That big blue one is particularly impressive.

 

Is that a fire fern over on the far right side of the tank? I cultivated that algae in the early days of my system, and could never figure out how to stop GHA from growing all over it. It seems to have little defense against encrustation by such epiphytes, and although they don't really seem to bother it all that much I did find them to be sort of unsightly. For whatever reason snails and crabs just do a poor job of climbing up and cleaning it off.

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Most of my salt drips come from when I stick my tweezers in there to fix a frag that's been tipped upside-down by a hermit crab, yet again. I need to wipe them off sooner or later. 

 

No clue why the pistol shrimp is fine with worms in there. She even walked out of her burrow to drop off an empty shell, practically stood on the worm, and ignored it! You'd think she would be freaked out by a worm that probably weighs more than her. 

I was not at all expecting that blue ric to get quite that large, but, hey, it does look cool. I fully plan to let rics just kind of take over that portion of the sandbed. I'm going to keep them mostly on top of some rubble, so it's easy to remove extra ones if/when they split. Might let some of them attach onto the rock? I'm trying to get a lot of that rock covered in the encrusting halimeda that's on top of it. 

 

The stuff on the right is one of the branching varieties of red bubble algae, but the one sort of wrapped around the rock on the left is a fire fern. You can see it's just got a layer of stuff on it. Both my mime crabs live in it, or I'd consider taking it out. I've read a couple of people talking about how they've had wild-caught macros that persistently grow hair algae, except on new growth that matures after addition to the tank, so I'm giving the macros a chance to do so. I cut a lot of material off the red bubble algae so the base of it gets some sun, and I'm hoping maybe the new branches will stay clean? It's working for the halimeda on top of the rock to the left. The new sprouts don't have hair algae. If the two red algaes keep having algae on them... I think I'll keep the fire fern? Stuff likes climbing it. But I'll probably take out the red bubble algae, though I don't know what I'd put there. I like having something tall. 

It's baffling that they get so much algae on them, though. You'd think they would be resistant to it somehow. I've tried pulling off the long tufts, and that helps a bit, but the snails (even tiny ones) don't seem to think it's worth climbing to keep algae short.

 

That's just kinda the algae zone on the right, there. I got some diatoms that I attribute to the reef roids (there was an increase in diatoms as I started feeding my acans on a regular basis), but they stay on that one wall, so I've decided I don't care and will continue feeding my corals the stuff that makes them nice and puffy. I can just toothbrush that wall during water changes. 

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Miiiight have gotten a couple things in the Top Shelf Aquatics live sale. A cool zoa with long tentacles called Tiki Torch, aaand a little bitty Holy Grail Micromussa. Very excited about that. I have a couple micro lords and a blasto happy in the tank already, so this guy should hopefully do well. 

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15 hours ago, Tired said:

It's baffling that they get so much algae on them, though. You'd think they would be resistant to it somehow. I've tried pulling off the long tufts, and that helps a bit, but the snails (even tiny ones) don't seem to think it's worth climbing to keep algae short.

I did the same thing back when I had larger macros. I had a huge, beautiful fire fern that was just a giant hair algae magnet, and I tried everything to keep it clean - toothbrushing it, tweezering the bigger tufts off, dropping hermits into it so that they'd get the hint - but nothing seemed to work. Like you said, it's pretty weird that such macros have little defense against this sort of encrustation. Perhaps out in the ocean red algae grow in lower-light areas where epiphytes are less likely to encrust them? I think I remember someone telling me that placing a fire fern in the dark for a couple of days could help to kill all the stuff growing on it, but I suppose it would just get re-encrusted when you move it back into the light.

 

15 hours ago, Tired said:

That's just kinda the algae zone on the right, there. I got some diatoms that I attribute to the reef roids (there was an increase in diatoms as I started feeding my acans on a regular basis), but they stay on that one wall, so I've decided I don't care and will continue feeding my corals the stuff that makes them nice and puffy. I can just toothbrush that wall during water changes. 

Seems fine to me, honestly. I like to have a certain amount of algae growing in my tank. It seems weird and suspicious when the walls and rocks are just totally devoid of growth... seeing a tank like that always gives me a strange pre-apocalyptic vibe, like some horrible meltdown is about to happen. Of course, you don't want the stuff growing all willy-nilly either, but I think your tank has a nice balance. It looks very rich and full of life.

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I think it may not help that a macro freshly added to the tank is under some degree of stress. I have a halimeda... opuntia? It's a clinging/encrusting species, much smaller than the typical big rooting ones, and it's definitely green. But it grew hair algae all over it when I added it. The new sprouts are algae-free. So I wonder if the stress while the macro is getting used to the new tank allows the algae to take hold, somehow overriding some sort of defense? 

 

I need to clean a couple of frag plugs off really well and put some snails on them so the snails will hopefully return in the future, but that's about all the algae that's actually causing an issue. The hair algae on the back wall isn't bothering anything, and, hey, nutrient export! I just wipe it off with a toothbrush now and then. And I like the looks of it, if I'm being honest, just that bit back there. The diatoms are less pretty, though! 

 

You know, the super-pristine reef tanks are pretty and all, but they always look a little like a display box. Nothing wrong with a display box, mind you! I just like the tanks with multicolored rocks instead of solid purple. 

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Oh, this is good! Just looked in there, and found that the larger micro decorator crab has molted. I was a bit worried about that, especially since my prior micro decorator (RIP) never molted and I thought that might have killed it. I wish I'd gotten a picture of it while it was naked, before it decorated itself again, but this is still pretty cool. If you look, it's all covered in loose tufts of hair algae, the algae hasn't grown over its shell yet to make an even covering. The real crab is on the right. 

If it doesn't eat the shell (and I don't think it's going to), I'm going to pull the shell out, pose it with pins, and dry it, and then I can keep it as a little specimen. I like the visible antennae, and I think it's in one piece. 

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There's so much stuff in this one picture! Micro decorator, periwinkle snail, dwarf cerith, checkered nerite, encrusting halimeda, red flame algae, Captain Jerks palys, branching coraline, codium, hair algae, and a bit of non-branching coraline scattered around. 11 species that I can see. And that rock has a bristleworm, micro brittle, amphipods, copepods, a sponge, a tunicate, and multiple other algae species growing on it, out of sight. I love biodiversity. And you can fit a lot of species in a small space when most of those species are tiny. 

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Oh, and this cool coraline algae is sticking around and seems to be growing. It's a bit hard to see in the picture, but it's actually textured. It has a sort of rippling texture to it, where those color variations are. It's pretty neat. 

 

You can also see a bit of black on that top plug. That's actually alive. Not sure what's up with the faint dust, but the black stuff has spread on a couple of plugs. It feels and grows like coraline. If I can get a patch reliably established, I might take a scraping and see if I can tell anything under a cheap microscope. It's grown on top of the coraline here, so it seems happy in the tank. Doesn't seem invasive or anything. 

 

Lots of mad zoas in this picture, though! The two frags on the very right had problems in shipping, the guy on the left had just been stepped on by a hermit, and the pink rose nebulas up top... I'm not sure. Some of the polyps are fine, some are closed but look OK, some I think might be a little damaged? And one, a couple days ago, was just a mess at the top. I thought one of my hermits might have tried to eat it, but given the rest, I'm not entirely sure. My guess so far is that the amphipods are causing problems again. I can't move the plug because they've attached to the rock, but if this continues, I might cut the trailing ones off, dip the plug with iodine, and put it somewhere else. 

 

Very bottom of the pic is a white sponge next to a bit of codium. The sponge came off a frag plug. It grows really slowly down there, but fast and branching in a lower, shaded spot. Think it doesn't like the bright lights. 

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I have something similar to that black-stuff on an old plug of mine, it's more of a really, really dark red for me. Not sure at all what it is, but it grows slowly and doesn't seem to spore out or anything, survived a couple peroxide dips and bouts of extended emersion too.

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Yeah, this stuff is super dark red under some lights, too. I really do think it's some sort of coraline- its growing edges are lighter than the rest of it, and the shapes of how it spreads look a lot like coraline. I should try and find the plug it came in on, I think that fell behind the rockwork at some point.  It's neat! I'd like more. 

 

Ooh, scrolling coraline would be cool. That's a decent spot for it, too, that's one of the spots I'm trying to encourage coraline in. I don't actually want a ton of coraline, I don't want to have that porosity reduction from the covering, but I definitely want some of it. I plan to keep that area fairly clean of zoanthids and whatnot so I can have the pretty patchy coraline. 

 

I have coraline growing on my tank walls, too. I rub it off with the dried superglue gel that I accidentally got on the ends of my tweezers. It comes off pretty well with that, without hurting the acrylic. Pretty stuff, but I don't want big patches of it to wind up on my glass. Do any of the pico-suitable algae scrubbers do a decent job on coraline? I keep meaning to get one of those little magnetic dealies, so it can get behind the rockwork more easily than my toothbrush can. I don't regret putting the rocks where they are, it'd look weird to keep them further from the glass and still have this shape that I like, but it does lead to some algae that I can't reach with the brush. Clean toothbrush works really well for the rest of the tank, though, and you don't exactly need something big in a pico.

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Huh, that's interesting. I'll have to see if I can get one. Maybe I can tie a bit of it to the end of a stick and use that to get behind rocks. 

 

ETA: my heart mime crab has all its legs, so it must have molted. Poor lil thing was having trouble navigating with just 3 legs, especially since it kept wanting to climb along rockwork. Did better than I would have expected, though, and now it can be nice and fast. It responds really enthusiastically when I offer it mysis. I don't see it often, so I can't feed it often, but it gets mysis whenever it's out. I'm hoping I can get it to come out more often. 

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Macros are all growing, even though the two red ones and the halimeda are covered in hair algae. The codium is not, aside from a branch of it that was directly under my lights for a bit and developed an interesting coating of cyano. 3" under the light is apparently a great place for cyano. Eh, the stuff's not spreading, it's fine. Just glad to see some growth, especially on the fire fern. I'm curious to see if it gets overgrown by hair algae or not. 

 

Also, the porcelain crab has discovered that the surface of the water exists, and spent several minutes poking at it. Interesting to watch, since it would probably never encounter the water's surface in the wild. There's something fun about an animal examining an aspect of physics it doesn't seem to know what to do with. You don't think about the surface of the water being a novel idea, until you see something like a fake-crab slowly trying to grasp at it. 

The Captain Jerks colony didn't die off or anything. I took the frag disc off the rock, snipped the edge (messily) off the disc, and glued that on. Now there's several polyps that were on the edge of the disc, and several that grew onto the rock and are now very annoyed about having been touched by an anemone. It'll be a little while before they grow back into that nice big colony again, but I didn't want the outline of the disc under there, and this is a fast-growing species anyway. This gives me some lead time before they spread a ton, since now they have to fill out that spot. My plan is to fence them in with halimeda so the patch can't grow too big. This kind gets nice long tentacles in that location of flow, at least on the biggest polyps. 

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I figured out why my red macros have started growing, I think. I was wondering about it- no noticeable growth whatsoever on them until recently. Then I realized, I've changed something lately. I'm dosing Chaetogro about once a week, just a tiny bit. Evidently that's got some good stuff in it. 

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She's in!

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The colors on this bitty frag are pretty wild. These pics, at least on my computer, are really close to it. I did not in any way touch these up, this is just what my eyes are seeing. I'll be interested to see exactly how much color stays, if my lights change it at all, but I expect it to stay really pretty regardless. It's only been in the tank for a few hours, it might puff up a little more tomorrow. Got the tiniest hint of some feeding tentacles out. 

This little frag could fit on my thumbnail. For perspective, that's a 3/4" frag disc. One full-sized polyp, two sort of mid-sized ones, one little baby, and one lump that... might turn into a polyp? About what I was expecting from the picture and from my knowledge of these. Pretty sure Holy Grail micromussa are micromussa... amakuensis? However it's spelled. The little bitty species, not acan/micro lords. I've seen pictures of whole colonies on frag discs, and I would love to have that. I would also like some frags to sell, granted, but... not until this lil guy turns into a big colony. Even then, I'd just trim an edge, I'm not cutting up a colony all the way. 

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This was a freebie from someone who sold me some zoas. I love the little blue polyps, but I don't know that I want a monti cap in this tank. Pretty sure I would shortly thereafter have only monti cap, and then have a skeleton because it would use up all the calcium in a five-block radius and die. Also, I kinda suspect the nutrient levels in this tank are going to knock out its color pretty notably. I will probably give this away to someone sooner or later, but I kinda want to find it a spot it likes and just let it grow a little. 

 

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"Killer Bee" zoas from Top Shelf Aquatics. I think. Looks a little like their Goldfish ones, also. Either way, I like the stripes, even if it's not super brightly colored. Also got a not-entirely-terrible image of some really neat unnamed zoas in the top there. I call them "Metal Mouths" for now. They're tiny, a quarter-inch across, and have this neat metallic color and a flake of metallic orange on the mouth. I really hope I can get them to do well, I want a patch. Maybe next to these bees/fish, actually. 

 

 

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King Midas zoas on the left. I actually have two frags of these, the frag I got split into multiple pieces because it was on a bit of rubble, and I'm keeping both. They're a bit nicer in person. Really bright yellow, and that dark ring is good contrast. Very charming somehow. The ones on the right are Sunny Ds that I photographed poorly, next to a frag of leftover clove polyps that the hermit crabs just finished playing kickball with. I moved it off the floor after the pic. The Sunny Ds are on the floor right now because I'm figuring out where to put them. From what I've read, these grow fast, so I have to figure out how to contain them. I really like them, much nicer in person. Bright yellow-green. 

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