Thu, 09/08/2005 - 00:58

Here's an interesting update.

A couple of days ago, a club member brought over some montipora frags, but my frag tank was full so I put them in my sump. These were a bunch of capricornis pieces, and they were relatively large (like an unbroken nice potate chip). I thought they might be coming on chunks of LR, so I asked him to bring me a bucket of saltwater to rinse them off in first, to remove any detritus. The montis were nice and clean in a separate container, so I placed them in the prop zone of my sump, and didn't bother rinsing them.

The next day, that bucket was in my way so I put it in the garage. The next day, last night, I decided I needed to dump out the bucket and rinse it, so I could stack it with the other empties. When I popped off the lid, I found a bunch of montipora digitata in there!!!! Oh no!!! I poured off the top 3 gallons of water, then reached into the warm water, grabbed some corals and put them into my icy (by comparison) sump. There must have been a dozen or more frags in that hot water, and they were still colored up. Imagine that -- first it sat in my fish room for a day at 78F (room temperature) then it was in the garage for a day which must have been near 100F, then into the sump all of a sudden when I discovered it.

A day later, the majority of the digitata are still colored up, much to my surprise. The capricornis are faded, but still alive. I have no lights over the prop zone of the sump; merely refugium lighting shining over the edge.

So two things have occured here: #1) I didn't lose the digitata at this point, and #2) montiporas are staying alive in my tank!!!!! Yay!! That was the coral I kept loosing over the past couple of months.

So how about what is going on inside the 280g tank itself?

I almost caught Tucker today. I've been watching the smaller Yellow Belly Hippo chase Tucker around the tank. I've always assumed the largest Yellow Belly is the male, and the smaller one is the female. Now I'm wondering what sex Tucker is, with the smaller chasing him/her. So they are flying around the tank all day long today, and I heard a splash, and a flopping noise. I didn't see anything, but 30 seconds later I heard it again. So I looked on top of the tank after not seeing three Hippos, and there was Tucker on top of one of the overflows. I grabbed a chair to stand on so I could get him carefully, and as soon as I was up there, he was back in the tank. Dang!!!!!! Oh well. ;)

I decided to remove some red mushrooms tonight, and while was tugging away at them one by one, I stripped away a number of dead skeletons from some SPS that are long gone. I pretty much focused on the right side of the tank tonight. Once I was done with that, I took some of my SPS from the frag tank and placed them in the reef. I have reason to believe they will do well now, since I saw other things that gave me hope: I found my little frag of A. valida (Steve Tyree LE frag) was still going strong after about 50% of it had died; the very large Orange Montipora foliosa that pretty much died from tip to tip has three small patches of life appearing (mere dots); the Surabaya Acropora that looked pretty much gone was actually doing quite well in the core itself. I took that last coral, and cut off all the dead branches and dead tips (like 1" worth) to get the coral more light and better flow, and placed it back in the tank.

I mounted loose stuff, and tried to just clean things up. I'm hoping after the water has been skimmed all night, the tank will look clean and the corals happy tomorrow.

The single polyp sun coral baby is still hanging out all by itself up on top of the rockwork, which is rather funny when you realize they live and grow in caves of virtual darkness. Often times you hear how suncorals need to be shaded. Well, this little guy sure picked a prime piece of real estate. LOL

Anyway, that is where things stand. My hopes are high, and I'm really looking forward to some pretty healthy SPS corals in my future.