Wednesday, January 13, 2010

New fish, new corals

Went to the LFS today afternoon to get a new fish (gift from my wife) and some new corals (gift from my grandmother) and replace the hammer the shrimp had eaten.  Also got some more cleaning crew becasue many died since mid-December.

Se let's start with "Dotty" our new Pseudochromis fridmani, popularly called "Orchid Dottyback".  He is very colorful, but quite shy (at least in his first day in the tank).  Most of the time he is hidden in the "caves" created by the rocks.  Here he is peeking out of the rocks, in a lucky shot where I got him and all the other fish together:



I was a little concerned about the shrimp attacking gung-ho style the hammer again, so I gave him abundant food before and while I was acclimating the fish and corals.  So far so good, the shrimp did not attack it... I hope that doesn't happen at night when I'm not here to watch it and scare the shrimp so he stops. So, here is the new hammer (Euphyllia ancora), the thing on the top of the picture is fish food that got held by the polyp as it was floating around.



Here is a new Acanthastrea cora (popularly called "acan"), of red color and grey highlights.  It is shrunk in this picture, because it has just been moved around.  It will look a lot better in a few days as it expands to full size:




And finally, we got a Caulastrea coral, known as Trumpet coral, of green color. It looks much better live than in the picture below:



I already saw the shrimp hovering on top of the acan, but apparently he didn't try to eat any of it's tissue.... let's see, let's see....

Notice we bought a very small number of polyps of each coral.  We're not confident of our husbandry skills yet, so we'd rather risk loosing just a few corals in a mistake than killing a lot of them.  As time goes by I hope to bring in more polyps at once (or it will take forever to populate this tank, as the corals grow very slowly, at least they have done that so far).

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