Feeding the open brain

05/29/04
Did some rock rearranging today in an effort to get more horizontal surfaces on which to place corals. Placing corals is surprisingly tricky. Higher up is better light, which most of them want, but they don’t want too much current, which is what you get higher up because there is no rock wall to break it. My husband invented a new outlet pipe for my pump today in an effort to diffuse the current more effectively. Formerly the pipe ended with an elbow that blasted all that current out against a single spot on the rock. He inserted a T above the elbow so that some of the current would come out before it got to the elbow at the bottom. Not only that, he drilled a slot in the pieces and put a set screw in the slots, so that we could adjust exactly where the blast aims.

This week I got pretty worried about the trachyphllia (open brain coral), which is looking considerably smaller than when I bought it. I never have gotten food into it that I know of. Whatever falls on it is consumed by the fish before the coral can. One night when the meal was bloodworms, I noticed one landed right next to the coral’s mouth. I observed the mouth opening wider and maneuvering ever so slowly toward the worm. Well, I got determined he was going to get that meal. So I stood there waving my hand around for 20 minutes to keep the fish and shrimp away while that mouth did its slow dance around the worm, eventually sucking it in. This is all pretty small scale, a bloodworm is as wide as a thin string and about 1/2 inch long. I tried to get a picture of the “action.” If you look carefully you'll see one of the mouths (each lobe has a mouth) and the bloodworm. Afterwards, I posted a question on a marine forum on the internet to see if anyone had suggestions for how to feed these guys. One person said to put a plastic pint basket over the coral (with a rock on top to hold it down) after you place the food on it. This will keep the fish away until it is done digesting (sounded like a good idea). Another guy (who is the forum moderator and the expert), said he distributes a finely ground mess of food to the tank as a whole after dark, when the corals prefer to eat. I think this might work well after you have wall to wall corals, but my specimens are pretty few and far between, so an awful lot of food would be wasted, and wasted food gets converted into nuisance algae.

Speaking of nuisance algae, I have a beautiful red macro algae (i.e., seaweed) that consists of small bubbles attached to branches. I had it in the main tank for quite awhile and it looked nice, but I began to worry that it would multiply and become a nuisance, so I moved it to the refugium. Lately I’ve observed small bubbles of this algae up in the main tank, clinging to the rock here and there. I’m thinking this is not a trend I like (the web is full of algae-related horror stories) so today I decided to take no chances and removed it to the quarantine tank in the basement. Macro algae is good for removing excess nutrients from the water, thereby helping to prevent micro-algae outbreaks, but it is tricky getting a type that is not going to go postal someday and wreck everything. Some types will enter a reproduction phase if they feel crowded, sending copious quantities of spores into the water, polluting it so badly that you have to do massive water changes to save your fish and corals. There is plenty to worry about in this hobby, for sure.