Molt

My cleaner shrimp molted yesterday or the day before. It's old shell was sucked up against a filter intake. This is the first time I noticed this shrimp had molted. My peppermint shrimp looks much bigger than when I got it so I'm sure it has molted several times. Since it is more of a recluse I never noticed it. I had purchased two peppermint shrimp but I still have not seen both of them at the same time since the day I bought them. I'm going to have to assume that one of them died.

In other news I went to the Asian market yesterday and picked up some nori. So far the yellow tang hasn't touched it. I guess he wants his lettuce back. While there I picked up some Japanese gummy candy for myself. I bought the strawberry and muscat (grape) varieties. They are really good actually. The descriptions on the packages are what cought my eye.

"Kasugai's strawberry gummy, made from fresh strawberry juice is a very delicious gummy. Please have fun time with this strawberry gummy."

"Its translucent color so alluring and taste and aroma so gentle and mellow offer admiring feelings of a graceful lady. Enjoy soft and juicy Kasugai Muscat Gummy."

I need a cigarette.

Invasive Polyps Vanished

It has been a little over a week since I bought my Yellow Tang and Frog Spawn Coral. During that time I also picked up a rock with button polyps. Since I made these additions my supposedly invasive Clove Polyps have completely disappeared. See my previous post on the polyps. I noticed that at one point the polyps were no longer expanding and only the stalks were visible. Now, there are none to be seen anywhere in the tank whereas previously they were on about 4 or 5 pieces of rock. I had my water tested today and there were no nitrates, nitrites or phosphates present in the sample. So, they didn't die off because of degrading water conditions. I made no changes to the lighting either. So what caused them to die off? Is it possible that the Yellow Tang ate the Clove Polyps? Did the other corals in the tank out-compete the Clove Polyps for nutrients? Even though the Tang picked at the rocks a lot I never saw it eat these polyps. Also, since the stalks were visible for a while it seems unlikely they were eaten. Perhaps they only like the conditions of an immature tank. I may never know. I'm just happy they didn't take over the tank.

Tug of war

I just observed an underwater tug of war. I fed Formula Two frozen food tonight and a piece fell on the sand bed right next to my tongue coral. A hermit crab saw it fell and ran to it about as fast as a small hermit crab can run. The crab grabbed it and started pulling it away from the coral. The meal wasn't as easy as the crab thought it would be because the coral was also pulling it. It was holding the piece of food with the tip of a tentacle. The crab pulled and pulled and stretched the coral's tentacle. The coral eventually let go and the crab got its meal. Feeling sorry for the coral I dropped another piece of food right in the center of it. It reacted by holding it with the tips of several tentacles. It retracted the tentacles in the area around the food and moved it to a mouth. The "lips" of the mouth surrounded the food from all sides engulfing it. About five minutes later there was no sign of the food at all. I knew that some corals would eat in addition to getting their nutrients from Zooxanthella but I never knew how it was done. What a cool thing to observe.

Romaine Lettuce

Since I bought my Yellow Tang last week I have had a piece of Romaine Lettuce clipped in the tank as a supplement. It was completely ignored by the Tang until yesterday. When I came home from work only the "skeleton" of tougher parts of the leaf remained. My kids reported that the tang was eating it non-stop. I have yet been able to get the tang to eat any flake or frozen food I have provided. It does graze pretty much non-stop on the live rock. Even before it started eating the lettuce its stomach started filling out nicely so I knew it was getting enough to eat. I do need to make a trip to an Asian market to pick up some nori which is dried seaweed which is supposed to be better for the tang than lettuce. In the meantime the lettuce will do.

Water Change

On Sunday 11/25 we performed the third water change. It had been close to three weeks since the last water change and my Xenia wasn't pulsing as much as it usually does. I had about 12 gallons pre-mixed to a SG of 1.023 and heated to a temperature of 78 deg F to match the conditions of the tank. Since I recently had some surgery I had to have my wife lift the buckets of water. I wonder how long I can use the surgery as an excuse? Hopefully, through the winter shoveling. ;-)

Darwin and Snails

The Astraea snail obviously didn't evolve in a fish tank. I have had to rescue countless snails that have somehow fallen off the sides of my tank. The snails always fall with the shell side down. Kind of like toast always falling with the butter side down. (Yeah, I know the Mythbusters disproved this). Once upside down the snails cannot turn themselves over. They'll try for a while. They'll stretch as far as they can to reach something solid but usually they can only grab sand. They will eventually give up and retract into their shell and pray that they will be noticed before they die. Usually my son notices them and I have to reach in and put it back on a rock. Surely this happens in the wild too. However, in the wild, the shell must protect them from death more often than it entombs them. I wonder how these snails would look if they evolved in an environment with vertical walls over sand.

Like a Kid in a Candy Store

On Tuesday 11/20 I made a trip to Beyond the Reef in Schaumburg Illinois for a Yellow Tang. This store is about 15 miles away but I made the trip since they had a larger selection of Yellow Tangs than my closest LFS. It seems like every time I visit a store I walk out with something I really didn't plan on getting just yet. This time I walked out with Yellow Tang and a Frog Spawn coral fragment. I couldn't pass up the coral. It was $25 (cheap for coral) and looked beautiful. It looks so much like an anemone and it fluoresces with a nice green color. It's also supposed to be quite hardy - a good starter coral.

Yesterday, I made a trip to my LFS for some frozen food. I walked out with Formula One, Formula Two and a rock encrusted with green button polyps. I couldn't pass that one up either. I have been keeping all of my receipts to figure out how much this hobby is costing me but I haven't mustered up the courage to add it all up yet. After I handled it I found out that the button polyps secret a toxin. A warning on the Marine Depot website states the following: "Caution should be exhibited when handling these corals however as they emit a powerful Palythoa Toxin. If the toxin (less than 10 grams) enters the bloodstream through the smallest cut on your hand you can get very sick and this is known to even cause death. If you have flu-like symptoms without a fever and you handled these corals bare handed you may want to seek immediate medical attention." I knew this hobby would kill my checking account but I didn't actually think it could kill me! I guess I'll have to use gloves from now on.