Penny was up and out this morning, perching amongst the closed polyps of the zoanthid staring at me. There weren't any pom poms in its claws yet.
Then I saw the skeletal remains of Chris the cleaner shrimp. Fortunately, I found Chris hiding behind the rockworks. It is still very shy and has not ventured out into the open waters yet. Hopefully with time, it would be brave enough to play with me.
I rearranged the display slightly and this is how it looks like currently. The sun coral definitely looked terrible.
I also dosed less than 1 ml of Reef Iodide in an attempt to get the Xenia to recover faster and promote the macroalgae growth.
I bought the following on 16 Jan 13:
- cleaner shrimp
- yuma mushroom
- pink Xenia
- clove polyp
- red bamboo macroalgae
- red cauliflower coral
- pom pom crab
From this photo, I thought my old clump of Xenia was almost gone. What is interesting is that this rounded skeletal piece that the Xenia was growing on is a live coral. I have seen the brown dots getting bigger. By the way, the new clump of pink Xenia turned a blue colour and looked very sad as if it was anemic with too much de-oxygenated blood.
The last photo showed the pom pom crab Penny taking cover.
Much has happened since day 15 but that would be in another post. I had a hard time feeding and coaxing the sun coral to eat.
In fact, I have been so busy these couple of days that I have not fed it for a few days now. It is definitely looking worse today than on day 15. Where is the glimmer of hope?
Everything remained pretty much the same and the snails were busy grazing.
Claudia was swimming all around the tank and sometimes diving straight at the GSP as if it was a bed of anemones. It must be under stress because it was either refusing to eat or has bad smell or eyesight because she never feed on the fish food or Mysis shrimps which I added to the tank. The Xenia still looked terrible and a few of the orange Rhodactis were detached from the skeleton and settled on the sand and amongst the mini Zoas.
It took me about 4 hours to feed Sunny but it didn't quite seem to eat much. I literally had to take a tweezer and pushed the Mysis shrimps into its mouth but it took forever to swallow even one shrimp. I would have to try tonight again to ensure it is eating.
Nothing much changed on most of day 13 except that I was freaked out again when the Turbo snails didn't move. Later on, 2 of them were actively scouting around the rocks, glass and sand for algae but 1 was immobile. If it is dead, I would have to quickly remove it before it polluted the water.
Luckily, this 1 here was happily coasting on the glass.
By the end of the day, I bought myself a small Clown Fish and a Sun Coral which I shall named Claudia and Sunny respectively. The Clown Fish has always besotted me and I don't think a marine setup is complete without this amazingly cartoonish yet attractive orange fish. The Sun Coral is orange too and I had a hard time coaxing it to feed on the Mysis Shrimps and freeze-dried Cyclop-eez. Hopefully I have better luck keeping it alive. I added a small filter at the same spot where I placed the wave maker to create some flow but the current seemed quite weak. This was also where I placed the Sun Coral.
In this post, the top half of the photos was illuminated with my existing 2 14W, 12,000k lights. In the second part, I turned on my new LED lights with 4 10,000k and 2 actinic blue partially and switched off the former towards the end.
Oh yes, the tank obviously looked different because I added the following:
- a plate of mini Zoanthids
- 2 stalks of Green Star Polyps (GSP)
- an unknown soft coral
- a Xenia at the corner
- 3 Turbo snails
- a live rock with Caulerpa and a Chaetomorpha in an old fish breeding container
I know I probably shouldn't stock the aquarium so quickly and one can tell my impatience from all these because I just couldn't wait any longer. Anyway, the Xenia looked like it was gone but I placed it in a corner with good flow and hope it would recover. If it is dead, it would definitely pollute the water significantly. One GSP opened up a bit while the other remained close. I actually wanted 3 Nassarius snails but they gave me 3 Turbo instead. I threw all of them in without acclimatizing them and for a while I was worried because they didn't seem to move at all except occasionally. Hopefully, they would do a good job of cleaning up the tank of hair algae. I got the Caulerpa first then managed to get the Chaetomorpha subsequently to help with nitrate export.
I was checking out the Clown Fishes and Six-Line Wrasses in the local fish shop (LFS) because I love both but ended up not buying any of them since the staff were busy. Well, at least I managed to curb myself and left the place before I succumbed to temptation again.
