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 State of the Tank: (cont.) |
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In fact, this time I’m even planning a side trip to Northern California where I hope to visit Atlantis Aquatics and finally see their amazing inventory in person…though the irony of earthquakes while being in California at a vendor named ‘Atlantis’, does NOT go unnoticed. But enough about me and catastrophes of Irwin Allen-esque proportion…
In regards to the tank, let me first remind you that normally I don’t like to make any changes before I leave town for extended periods of time. My CS/IO disaster of a few years back taught me not even to attempt changing salts when vacation time is near. But this year, some pressing problems necessitated severely bending this rule. I did not introduce any new corals, but I did have to do much more fragging and rearranging than I wanted to. The first, which I mentioned last month, concerned my ‘Staghorn Jungle’  which had begun to die off at the base due to what I believe was a lack of water flow and light to these lower areas. So we completely fragged it down, saving a few frags for ourselves, and brought it to an LFS. Doing this at this time really didn’t concern me because the corals that made up the ‘jungle’ are some of the oldest and hardiest I have and I knew the frags would bounce back. They always have. Also, since I was making a delivery to the LFS, I threw in my Birdnest too.
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| Another problem solved (see last month’s update) and for the first time in awhile, I actually had some prime real estate to play with .
So, buoyed now by the success of that operation, Ray and I decided to tackle yet another chronic problem area in the tank: My Hydnophora. Once again, we let its growth go unchecked and were now paying for it by the great deal of damage it was beginning to wreak upon the acros around it. As most of you know, Hydnos are some of the most gorgeous ‘SPS’ corals we maintain. In addition to being hardy, they absolutely GLOW under actinic lighting and can command the center of attention in any tank. But right below the brilliantly colored fuzzy surface we adore so much, lies certain and sudden death if we allow this species to encrust its way toward other corals. It doesn’t just have sweepers, this baby extrudes a veritable web of stinging nettles that, upon enveloping a nearby stony, all but immediately melts the flesh off of it. A few months back, I posted a shot of my hydno giving the acid hug to one of my little tri-color colonies .
Since then, it has damaged sections of several other pieces surrounding it and was now encrusting it way toward some of my absolute favorites (How do they always seem to know?). Because we were tired of worrying about it and I was afraid of the havoc it could wreak while I was gone, we finally decided to remove it entirely. After all, the Staghorn deforestation went well. How tough could this be? |
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