Well other than the horrendous traffic (4 hour move to a 7 hour move thanks to the bay bridge) the tank moving went smooothly, thought I had a break though because water was leaking out of the box, but it had just splashed a little because I got that sucker out and had a real good look over to make sure. Turned on the lights briefly to make sure nothing was injured. Here is an interesting one… the bivalve I found earlier… he moved to the other side of the rock! Because of that his shell got a little chipped but he seems to be fine. Now I can get a good picture of him though!
Hahaha, well nothing new yet. Although I took my room mate to DPA today to show her our closest fishy store and I saw some really pretty mushrooms that I was going to get but then decided not to do it yet since I’m already going to add some more rock and I don’t want to have anything bad happen. Even though nothing bad should happen and mushrooms are hardy I didn’t want to risk it. Unless someone tells me that I’m an idiot and I should go back to get the mushrooms I’m not going to get them. Here are some pictures as requested
New Collinista (sp?) snail that came on Zoa rock
Brittle Star
Mystery polyp revealed himself alittle, orange center and green skirt
Larger Featherduster
My favorite little featherduster
Mystery bivalves new perch
I did use a magnifying glass. The problem is my digital camera probably cost a grand total of $90 and well… yeah it is a POS.
The bivalve moved! Now I can barely see him much less get a good shot of him with my camera. We might have to wait to see if he moves again before I can get another decent picture of him.
Good news! Got some new rocks thanks to Icy with lots of new life on it! Yay!
Bad news, mushrooms look as if they have all turned themselves inside out… What could that be and is it bad? Because it looks bad. All of them are doing it. It looks like the bigger one has sucked himself in a little though. Can’t get a picture til the lights come on tomorrow, hopefully it will be fixed by then. Probably going to work on the aquascape a little more tomorrow as well when I can see all the pieces and think a little better. lol
May have been that adding a significant amount of rocks triggered a larger then normal cycle or somehow through off the water chemistry? Possibly… I would check all the parameters and see how things are doing in the morning. If the shrooms are not better the only thing I would try is small frequent water changes. Don’t want to change something that will just make it look better because all it would mean for the animals would be more stress.
Sometimes the more frilly, bumpy, pimply mushrooms(or what ever you prefer to call them) will expel there stomachs when they aren’t happy. Some of the green ones I got from kaptin Ken always spill there guts when I got to slice them into pieces. They recover from it 90% of the time. Give them a chance. Just double check the water parameters and if something is off in the Nitrate cycle try a small water change and give it time.
Ok, yeah well the new rock hadn’t been in for long. But I might check the params now and then in the morning. Right now the larger one isn’t fully back in but they all seem to be working on going back inward. I can’t see the other. But as of now it looks like it was just a shock reflex type thing I suppose. We will see how they look in the morning.
Cool beans. You’ll see some freaky, out of this world, type things in your reef tank. I remember the first time an Amphipod came off a rock and crawled around my fingers, lol. Maybe sometime I’ll share with you my experience with a “parasitic isopod”. Some of the guys in the club still get chills every time I say those two words.
Aww man I have seen pictures of some of the parasitic isopods out there. Veeerrry creepy.
Speaking of “bugs” I saw this one creature in my tank and at first I thought it wa a snake but I think I found the dead body of it later. It kind of looked like a millipede/centipede type thing. Just another isopod I guess? It was rather large too. Was black and white and the black was in stripes.
Tested the params a bit ago, everything is a-okay numbers wise. We will see tomorrow.
Google enucid worms. Hopefully not one of them but ya never know. Enucids are fairly nasty critters… I helped a LFS owner back in maine extract a 3 1/2 foot long one from some newly imported LR. He kept it in its own tank and fed it loose mushroom polyps that people brought in for store credit.
Ok, I am going to hope it isn’t that thing, because it kinda resembles, it but then again I didn’t get a good look.
The mushrooms are ok! Levels are great, everything is peachy!
Here are some pictures of the new look
All zoas are out
All Nass. snails are still alive
Btw, how do you suggest scrubbing that annoying green corraline algae off the sides, it just keeps coming and my dinky plastic scraper doesn’t do much and I really don’t want to put my hands in there too often.
Glass, just use a razor blade. I found an all plastic scraper at lowes for a couple bucks that holds like a 3" blade, makes short work of coraline on the glass.
If acrylic - I have no idea, I’ve never owned one. I imagine you could still use a razor blade, just be VERy careful.
Ok well it is glass so I will have to construct something that will work. I will let you know how all that goes. lol
I know so far the only effective thing has been my finger nails and well… not very efficient. verdict_in
I just started thinking about it, since I’m going to eventually get fish, and 2 of the 3 are jumpers… Should I go for mesh or order the glass top for the aquapod? The temp of the tank in the room with the heater on only at night and the light on during the day is it stays at 82 at night and reaches 84 during the day. The pros of the mesh is heat can escape, the cons are that it can dim the light a bit. The glass top pros are all the light can get through but it might trap in heat. Being in college I don’t have access to glass tools so that I could “make” vents or something similar in the glass. Any thoughts? I was thinking about maybe like a mesh thing that just slants inward but doesn’t cover the tank, so that if a fish were to jump it would hit the barrier and be deflected back into the tank… only issue is it would not look very pretty.
The glass is going to reflect almost as much light as the mesh will block so its going to be a problem either way. The alternative would be build a canopy type structure that straddles the rim of the tank and extends the wall 6" or so on all sides. Ive seen threads on reefcentral where people have constructed these out of acrylic and its not to conspicuous. A wooden canopy would do the exact same thing and look better. Is the aquapod rectangular or is it an odd shape? It may be more difficult for an odd shape.
Although I took my room mate to DPA today to show her our closest fishy store and I saw some really pretty mushrooms that I was going to get but then decided not to do it yet since I’m already going to add some more rock and I don’t want to have anything bad happen. Even though nothing bad should happen and mushrooms are hardy I didn’t want to risk it. Unless someone tells me that I’m an idiot and I should go back to get the mushrooms I’m not going to get them. Here are some pictures as requested 
