Brittlestar

4/27/04
The suicidal chromis from last episode did make it, at least for awhile. I returned him to the main tank the next day and everything seemed fine. But yesterday when I got home from work, a small body was found in the protective grill around the overflow. Was it the same one, a little weaker than the others after his rug sojourn? Or did he really hate tank life that much, and like Nemo, was willing to risk all to escape? Boy, thoughts like that can make you feel guilty about having a fish tank....(If any of you haven’t yet seen the movie Finding Nemo, do go rent it, it is marvelous. The rumor is that many well-meaning--and presumably unsupervised--little kids flushed fishes down the toilet after seeing the movie, to let their charges go home...)

There is another new arrival to tell you about. Last Saturday I returned to the shop and purchased a brittle starfish that I had seen there Friday but didn’t want to buy until I researched it more. (Normally I shop on Fridays so my husband won’t know how much money I’m spending....did I say that? I meant so he won’t have to wait for me while I spend hours talking to the dealer and deciding what to buy.) Anyway, this fella is black on top, reddish on the bottom, with rather thin, octopus-like arms with little spikes all over. The arms are more like thick strings than what we normally think of when you say “starfish.” The dealer said they are hard to sell, because after you buy one, you never see it again as they can get into very tight spaces. But the book said they are pretty great scavengers because they can get food that is stuck in the small spaces none of the other creatures can reach. Right now he is in the refugium, as I wanted to be sure he was ok before placing in the reef. Took the picture right after putting him in, before he had time to hide.

My Coral Beauty dwarf angel finally took a bite of flake food! Mind you, she spit it right out afterwards, but this is a big step up from approaching the food, then doing a rapid backpedal when she decided it might bite her. She’s been eating algae, so I haven’t been too worried, but she would starve on that eventually, so this is an important step. Maybe by this weekend, she’ll even swallow the stuff!

The dealer thinks she has a tang of the type I want coming in this week. I got a larger quarantine tank set up in anticipation of this. You’ll recall that when I had the ich emergency a few weeks ago, I set up the 10 gallon, but that isn’t big enough to keep a tang in for weeks, so I emptied that and put up the 20. Tangs are the most sickness-prone of all the marine fishes, so you have to be really careful, and a 4 week quarantine is really the minimum.