Curtis1
11/18/2013, 08:12 PM
I've been in and out of the hobby for a long time. I have also had a lot of different experiences. Usually when something bad happens that's it. The deal is done and over. You just lick your wounds, chock it up to more experience, learn from it, then just pull your wallet out again and replace what you lost. Well, I am here to say, finally something good has came my way, after a bad event. I am trying to stock my tank with a good mix of Zoos and Palys as the majority of my corals, mixed in with a few LPS and SPS. Well we ended up with a cute little Flametail Blennie. He was fine at first. Good model tank citizen. Kept to himself, never bothered anyone. Ate great !!! Flake, Pellets, Nori on a clip, Algea that I let grow on the pumps and back wall. Well got an order of new Zoos and Palys in. I placed them on the sandbed to acclimate. I guess he assumed that they were food/snacks !!! Of 16 new frags, he ate nearly half of them the first day. I came home and his stomach was swollen, huge. I started watching him at that point. Didn't take long to catch him in the act. So I caught him and took him back to the Pet Store. About 2 weeks went by and I started noticing them being chewed-up, some spots missing in the middles of some of them. So again, I started watching to figure out what was going on. It was my One-Spot Foxface !!! I had him for around 3 mos with no issues what-so-ever, then one day outta the blue, he decides to start trying all of my corals and clams as if they are an all you can eat salad bar !!! My fish are fat and healthy. The Foxface was an easy 1" thick. I feed 5-6 times a day. 2 auto feeders, plus pellets, 2 kinds of flake, squid, krill, mysis, brine shrimp, marine cuisine, emerald entrée, plus fresh clam and cyclop-eeze. So don't let anyone tell you that if you feed a fish well, they won't bother your corals. They do what they want to do when they want to do it. Anyway, the Foxface nibbled the Zoos more than he liked the Palys. He ate the entire polyps and in a couple of instances, there were just a very small amount of the mat left, say around 1/8" area ? Otherwise you could just make out the outlines of where the colonies were, he almost nibbled them away to nothing. So I just pulled out all of the plugs that had been stripped and set them aside to use at a later date. But here's the good news,,, nearly all of my older established colonies that were wiped out,,, are coming back in and get this,,, three times as many polyps as I had to begin with !!! They have even started growing back in a couple of spots just to the edges of where they were before. I guess that's what they are really meant for in nature, food, because they rebounded too well. Good to know, so if it happens to you, don't do as I did, and throw away the plugs after the zoos get eaten, chances are they will all grow back in a short while. I am now back up to 65 different corals. Around 27 different Zoos and Palys. I always try to research RC before I add anything to the tank. You just never know about some fish.