60g Cube

twentyleagues · Feb 23, 2024

Looks good! I cant wait til 3/5 to see whats in store.

Rjukan · Feb 24, 2024

Rjukan · Mar 19, 2024

Teaser..

Rjukan · Apr 1, 2024

Rjukan said:
Tested Alk with my new hanna alk tester and it was pretty low at 5.3, so I have been adding 2 part over the last few days and there is a noticable improvement with my zoas. Going to pick up the calc tester soon, I love how easy they are to use.

It was 5 years later.. almost to the month, when I got around to buying that Calcium tester lol.

Rjukan · Apr 10, 2024

Idk where it came from but one of the only corals that lived through the bad years was a type of encrusting coral that looked like it had gorgonian polyps. I thought that was odd since gorgonians only branched not encrust, I was wrong lol. I looked into it today and yeah, it's considered a miserable pest like clove polyps. So I just removed the rock it was on, and then used bone cutters to remove the rest that was on a large rock I wasn't going to remove.

Just enjoying the hobby and not getting too worked up over anything. Staying consistent with maintenance, and I've got several corals from the weekly POTO auctions since they are local.
Mantis Tank is doing great, and she made it through first molt no problem. Now she knows the feeding tube and comes out and holds on to it lol.. I've got a nice order of snails and crabs coming from @reefcleaners tomorrow for her too.

Rjukan · Saturday at 12:40 PM

Found 1 of these guys on 2 separate zoas.. I guess they are the bad ones, so I pulled out a few this morning. I really can't imagine how many I have in the tank since I've always left them alone. Might consider picking up a harlequin shrimp today if the LFS has any.

twentyleagues · Saturday at 4:17 PM

Rjukan said:
Found 1 of these guys on 2 separate zoas.. I guess they are the bad ones, so I pulled out a few this morning. I really can't imagine how many I have in the tank since I've always left them alone. Might consider picking up a harlequin shrimp today if the LFS has any.

I know people say this from time to time but I caught them eating zoas. No the zoas were perfectly healthy and not in decline. In fact they were spreading and looking great. Multiple nights I found one or more of these on zoas or palys in different colonies and when pulled them off the coral there was a little hole where the star had been. A pair of harlequins were employed and they handled business quite rapidly. In fact I had to pick stars from locals or buy them from lfs's once they found out why. Eventually I had to put them in their own tank and feed them chocolate chip stars. They rapidly deplete the stars once they get used to the tank.

Rjukan · Saturday at 4:21 PM

twentyleagues said:
I know people say this from time to time but I caught them eating zoas. No the zoas were perfectly healthy and not in decline. In fact they were spreading and looking great. Multiple nights I found one or more of these on zoas or palys in different colonies and when pulled them off the coral there was a little hole where the star had been. A pair of harlequins were employed and they handled business quite rapidly. In fact I had to pick stars from locals or buy them from lfs's once they found out why. Eventually I had to put them in their own tank and feed them chocolate chip stars. They rapidly deplete the stars once they get used to the tank.

Yeah, and I would easily be able to keep them going since I have the asterinas in my sump as well... But after some research, my flame hawkfish would probably make a nice quick expensive meal of them. So that's not going to happen.

twentyleagues · Saturday at 7:34 PM

Rjukan said:
Yeah, and I would easily be able to keep them going since I have the asterinas in my sump as well... But after some research, my flame hawkfish would probably make a nice quick expensive meal of them. So that's not going to happen.

Yeah the hawkfish is probably a deal breaker. Dont underestimate the power of the harlequin though you would be out of stars in no time. If anything took care of pests as well as them I would buy them in a heart beat. ie peppermint shrimp-aipstasia, emerald crabs-bubble algae, whatever else you can think of except some wrasses and flat worms.

Rjukan · Saturday at 7:50 PM

It's wild they can be so effective, I'd love to know how many they can take out in a night.

At any rate I'm not too broken up over it.. I don't see the stars on the zoas that often, and I see good growth in most cases. I'll work on manual removal every day before the lights turn on.

twentyleagues · Saturday at 10:48 PM

Rjukan said:
It's wild they can be so effective, I'd love to know how many they can take out in a night.

At any rate I'm not too broken up over it.. I don't see the stars on the zoas that often, and I see good growth in most cases. I'll work on manual removal every day before the lights turn on.

After they wiped out the ones in my tanks I added about 100 a week and at the end of a week there would be no sign of any stars. It was kind of horrifying what they'd do with cc stars. They would eat off a leg and just ride around on it until they decided to eat again. I eventually sold them to someone with a star issue for like a 1/3 of what I paid. I think they went through 3-4 tanks before I lost track of them.