Meet My New Frags

After a bad week at work I decided I deserved to reward myself with a little gift. Well, actually nine little gifts. Meet the new frags:

Multi Color Millepora


Blue Polyp Stylophora (Cat's Paw)


Either an Echinata or Tenuis


Wicked Tri Color



Forest Fire Digitata


Tri Color Plana


Kiwi Strawberry


Red Planet


Blue Vermiculata



I bought these from Madfrags Online. I couldn't be happier with my purchase. Justin was extremely helpful and even emailed me to see how the frags were acclimating to my tank. I had been looking for some colorful frags at my LFSs but I couldn't find anything that really stood out and was at a fair price. He has some really nice pieces available and he has them priced very fairly in my opinion. Some of these frags he even through in for free. I'll definitely purchase frags through him again.

I spent this morning arranging my tank to accommodate all the new frags. I added a few pieces of dry rock that I had left over in the process. At the rate coraline has been growing in my tank again it won't be long before these bleached rocks are nice and pink. Here is how the tank looks now.



I was running out of holes in my LR for the frag plugs. I discovered that the plug breaks off the disc easily if I hold the disc in a pair of pliers and snap the plug off with another pair of pliers. The disc can then be epoxied to any rock with reef epoxy putty. Yeah, I'm relatively new to this.

Some growth pics

Montipora Digitata
Jan 19, 2009


June 9, 2009



Bali Green Slimer
Jan 19, 2009


June 9, 2009



Monti Cap
Jan 25, 2009


June 9, 2009

New Corals

I picked up four very small SPS frags last Sunday 6/7.

Miami Orchid. My child BTA is in the bacground


Green Birds Nest


Purple Digitata (behind the Ausie Acan)


And finally a teal something or another. Looking at it essentially from the top down.

Hunting for a Home

My second anemone, the child, emerged from hiding yesterday evening and started crawling up the back glass. It got dangerously close to my overflow so I decided a relocation was necessary. I removed him from the glass quite easily and placed it in the crevice between two rocks. It has moved about 6 inches from that spot in the last 24 hours. The nightmare scenario is this guy getting sucked up in a power head and nuking the tank.

In Hiding

I was out of town from Tuesday through Friday last week. When I returned home I found that one of the anemones had moved and was in hiding. I'm calling this one the clone or child since the other anemone is in the original spot and pretty much looks the same size as the anemone before the split. In fact I forgot all about it for a while before realizing there should be two anemones.

I moved some rocks around and turned some rocks over and found the child hanging upside down under a rock perhaps a foot away from the parent. It looks healthy so I'm not too woried that it is hiding.

Full Tank Shot

Here is the latest full tank shot. All corals are doing well and growing.

My Anemone Split

After getting home from work yesterday I looked at my tank and saw that my Green Bubble Tip Anemone had split into two. It may have split Thursday night or during the day on Thursday. I looked at the tank on Friday morning before the lights came on and it looked like the anemone was covering a larger area. I started to worry that it was moving again.





Thursday I traveled for work all day and had to get up at 4:00 am to make a 7:00 flight. It was a one day trip and when I got home I was too tired to do much more than glance at the tank nothing caught my eye.

Kind of weird but the two clones have different personalities. The top clone is keeping the tentacles inflated. The bottom one is not. It also looks like the bottom clone has already developed a new mouth whereas the top one is still working on it. The clown goes back and forth between the two like it is a single anemone.



So why did my BTA split?

Chances are I stressed it during the water change I performed on Wednesday night. I poured a bucket of water in kind of quickly right over the anemone. I had done this before however this time the flow was a little faster since the bucket kind of got away from me.

It was right after I did this water change that I removed the bridal veil netting from my two Koralia power heads. This really increased the flow. The tentacles of the anemone were now waving all over the place. The increased flow may also have been the culprit.

Perhaps the was just happy and wanted to reproduce. I don't know. The anemone seems to have been happier lately and hadn't moved for about a month. I think it settled down because I started feeding it again. I had stopped feeding it after my Tomato clown started hosting it and was feeding it. I hadn't seen the clown feeding it so I was worried that it wasn't getting enough to eat. So now I give it about a third of a thawed shrimp tail twice a week. Perhaps the feeding made it happy again. Who knows.

I am wondering if it one of them is going to split again. I can see the foot gripping the rock one two sides of the anemone. I'll have to keep an eye on it.