Rescued Dendrophyllia

[teddscau]

How cute is my dendro? He came with the pre-owned 75g we bought in May. He only had seven polyps and was so unhealthy when I brought him home. His polyps barely extended, and his skeleton was infested with what I can only describe as white, $#%@ millipedes. They lived in burrows in his exposed skeleton, and when I fed him, they would rush out and start attacking his polyps, biting his tentacles and crawling right into his mouths to rip food out. Over the course of a couple months (I gave him plenty of time to recover after each session), I would remove him from the tank, put him in a bowl of tank water, and inject the tiny burrows in his skeleton with Melafix, and scrape all the millipedes out before using coral putty to seal up any cracks or holes in his skeleton. I removed at least 15 millipedes per polyp.

This is him the first week:


Here he is a few weeks later (look how much happier he is from his daily feedings!):


And finally, here he is today:


He's getting really overgrown (he has 19 polyps now!), so I think I'll have to "prune" him this summer. For some reason they decided to grow new polyps all in the same spot, so now the "baby" polyps are all smooshed into each other.

[velvetelvis]

Nice! I have a rescued dendro that I adopted from a friend of mine who grows corals. A customer traded it in, but she didn't have the time or space to dedicate to NPS. I've been feeding it 2x/week for about 2 months. No new heads yet (it came with a couple of smaller ones in addition to the main polyp), but it's getting fatter and the tentacles are getting longer.

[xxtriggermanxx]

Nice work, looks great !

[teddscau]

Thanks guys! He's my favourite animal in the tank (besides the Halloween hermit crab that came with the tank). He looks so amazing now. Some days he's fussy (polyps hardly extended), but most of the time his polyps are fully extended.

Velvet, that's great to hear about your dendro! I've never kept a saltwater tank before, but I find dendros really easy to care for. I just don't get it when someone says they don't have enough to look after them (I'm referring to your guy's previous owner, not you). I mean, just squirt some food in their polyps when you're feeding your tank. Oh, if you want your dendro to grow faster, I'd recommend feeding it nearly everyday. At its previous home, my guy was only being fed once or twice a week, and was shy and didn't look very happy. After a few weeks of feeding him everyday, he perked right up and started fully extending his polyps. In the beginning, he was so skinny, but now his polyps are rediculously fat. His polyps greedily gobble up (thawed) frozen silversides that I break in half for it. Then again, my guy has like, a billion tiny polyps now, so maybe it's best to feed less frequently so its polyps focus on growing larger, rather than sprouting a bunch of baby polyps all in one spot

[velvetelvis]

Originally Posted by teddscau

Velvet, that's great to hear about your dendro! I've never kept a saltwater tank before, but I find dendros really easy to care for. I just don't get it when someone says they don't have enough to look after them (I'm referring to your guy's previous owner, not you).

Thanks for the advice! I don't know about the previous owner, but in fairness to the friend who got the dendro from him and then passed it on to me, she's a single mom with her own aquaculture facility/shop, who also travels to and organizes reefing events throughout the year. So she actually is crazy-busy! She has a soft heart and takes in corals and fish needing TLC pretty regularly. The coral was doing OK for her, but she figured it would get more attention in my setup.

I feel really lucky that my first and only NPS coral was both free and an easy species to keep. I'm really enjoying it.