[optical]

i just picked up this Tubastrea on saturday. my question is, is the placement ok where its at...on the sand bed under the rock? and do i only feed it when its polyps are opened up? some of the polyps are actually under the coral mass maybe slightly burried in the sand, how do i feed those ones? or do they share the food throughout itself like most lps?


...also, i can never seem to feed a little pink tip anemone, no matter how much i try to feed it, my cleaner shrimp immediatly goes over and steals the food from it, sometimes eating it, sometimes just stealing it and throwing it to the side! its quite funny to watch, and ive never heard of this behavior before. he almost got eaten himself but i think that anemone has a really weak sting. any suggestions? occupying him with some other food doesnt work either.


more still.... can anyone id these two shrooms? i think the shroom on the left is maybe either a florida or a yuma recordia? not sure what the really green one is though? none the less, i think their really nice looking shrooms

[optical]

one more thing then i'll leave you guys alone.
what do you think about the vinyl stick on backgrounds for the back of the tank? what looks the best? im leaning towards black or blue? im sick of looking through the tank and seeing my laundry room so im getting a background but not sure what to get.

[Ray_D]

i painted my back ground on the out side of the tank, flat black, i take a lot of pictures and i think if i would have whent with somthing more glossy i woud get lots of flash effects, flat black with the glass is good unless i get a wierd angle like .. straight on ..


hope that helps

[almostdiva]

optical,

Your tubastrea doesn't really care where you place it -- it is non-photosynthetic -- so it has no zooxanthellae, so it gets no nutrients from light. You need to feed each individual polyp, it won't "share". There are several strategies for this -- putting the coral in a bowl of your tank water with a "slurry" of finely chopped, meaty foods to entice the polyps to open (feed it when they are open...), put some juice from thawed, meaty foods into the tank prior to feeding to get the polyps to open. Anthony Calfo talks about this coral at length in his "Book of Coral Propagation".

Rebecca

[dreams]

i feed my anemones w/ a skewer....the cleaners run over to get the food, but i put in close to their mouths...they grab it, before the shrimps can get it

and...i am working on a coralline background:-)

[BubbaWPB]

Cleaner shrimp are notorious for stealing food out of anemones and other meat-loving cnidarians.

I can't tell from your pictures, but the way to tell R. yuma from R. florida is that yuma has bumps on it's mouth protrusion, and florida's is smooth.