Anemone on the move

I went out the other day for a little post-thanksgiving shopping & when I returned home I was greeted with a big surprise. After over 4 months of happiness living in the same spot on the reef, my bubble tip anemone (E. quadricolor, at left) decided to move to the lower left corner of the tank. The first thing that ran through my mind was "uh-oh, whats wrong?" but then after a water test (everything was spot-on), a feeding, and a few days of observation... everything seems ok. The anemone isn't bouncing around, the clown fish which used to host inside the anemone is still hosting despite the new neighborhood, and save for some mushroom corallimorphs who don't welcome the competition, all of the other critters seem generally unaffected by the move.
All I can do now is sit back and watch. I kind of wish he'd move back... I now have a huge hole in the center of my tank where the anemone used to live and I'm not about to put anything else in its place... oh well, I guess I should give him the freedom to at least move around since he no longer calls the vast ocean his home. Below is a photo that documents the move.

Progress & Decline

Just thought i'd give an updated progress on the frag of Favia which is in my tank... after the mild bleaching (no doubt stress related due to what I have deemed as insufficient acclimation time), the live tissue has all rebounded. All the picture above doesn't show, the color is much stronger and the polyp mouth is visible and no longer sunken deep into the calyx. There was some loss of live tissue around the edges, but the central polyps appear to generally be on the rebound. This is my first foray into a non-fungiid scleractinian, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed. If the worst should happen, I'll use this as a learning experience and hope to not make the same mistakes twice. The rebound of the mouth tissue & regaining of tissue color is a very positive sign, but its such a small colony and so much tissue loss has already occurred. I'm gonna pull for the little guy & I'll keep updating progress as the story continues.

Growing, growing, growing

So, aside from my Favia frag, all of the coral relatives I have in the tank are growing like wildfire. As you can see above the yellow leather has grown quite a bit since it was introduced two months ago. On the other side of the tank, my mushroom corallimorphs have just gone crazy. Way back in May I started with 4 mushrooms in the whole tank. I now have 12 polyps on one rock alone (photo below), and a total of 24 polyps in the whole tank. For anyone who is interested in the evolution of these things, there was a recent study published with genetic data which suggests that corallimorphs evolved from corals several 10's of millions of years ago. So in other words, some corals decided to lose the bulk of their heavy skeletons and go the soft & solitary route... interesting stuff.

Took a chance...

so this weekend I took a chance on a scleractinian frag (Favia danae) when I got some water for my water change. As you can see from the photo... I'm not so sure if it's going to make it. In my last posts, I was talking about a coral bleaching study I am working on. Now it appears as if I've got a bleaching case-study in my own tank. This is not ideal, but since everything else I'm keeping is doing so well (Including some scleractinians & alcyonaceans; post to follow), I thought I'd try my hand with this little frag. Perhaps he was too damaged from the fragging, or I didn't provide a good enough acclimation, but I'm worried by next week I won't have a living frag anymore. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.