Feeding corals

5/10/04
Last night before bed, my husband peaked in the tank and called me down to see that the brittle star had finally moved from the spot in the rock where it has stayed ever since I released it in the tank 2 weeks ago. The bad news was that it went into the watchman goby/shrimp’s hole. We theorized that it could smell that big piece of tuna the shrimp had snagged earlier and dragged inside. Despite the fact the brittle star is supposed to be a scavenger, I had a few worried thoughts about the health of my goby and shrimp. The star emerged within a few minutes. It’s stomach didn’t look bulged, so I was hopeful it confined itself to tuna. In fact, this was proven tonight, because the goby showed up for dinner on schedule.

At feeding time tonight, a piece of flake food accidentally landed right in the center of a polyp of the green striped zooanthid coral (pictured). Thinking that would irritate it, I was just about to blast the piece off with my turkey baster when the fringes around the rim of the flat plate extended and closed around that piece of food. It was totally enclosed in about one second. Amazing to see. This is a soft coral that supposedly lives off the photosynthetic organisms in its cells, I didn't think it was one of the ones the dealer told me to aim food at. If the trick to success is that the food has to hit dead center, they may starve, because the spray of food never seems to get to the right place when I’m trying to aim it--today’s hit was not on the coral I aimed at.

The bicolor blenny has now been missing for 3 days and presumed dead. Did his incident in the feather duster worm tube kill him? We’ll never know. He was small enough that the scavengers in the tank could easily consume the body before I would find it, so its hard to say what went wrong.