DOH! Disturbin the peace! Zoa eating nudibranches

So this past week I've noticed a few of my zoas were not opening like before... by before, I mean last week when they were open pretty much 18 hours a day. At first I thought maybe some of my levels were off and that the weekend water change would fix it, however, it seems like the issue is actually a lot worse.


I'm not sure if you can see it in this picture... but there is a nudi crawling over the closed zoas that it's disturbing. Not only has these nudi's mysteriously appeared, their ruffles or feathers have started to take on the metallic florescent colors of the zoas they've been eating! It's kind of weird but I guess it makes sense. The nudi's on my dragon eyes have a yellow glow to it while the ones on my orange zoas shine orange. If you click on the picture to get the bigger version, you can actually see a yellow nudi on the red zoas. Stupid nudi who thinks he can grab and collect all the colors of my collection...

Reading online, it seems that people have been successful getting the population under control via fresh water dips but I don't think I want to go this route. First of all, it's a lot of work and I'm personally just not a fan of taking something out of its element for dips. Can you imagine a higher being saying... hey, that girl over there has pimples, I'm pretty sure we have to pick her up and put her in space so the pimples will pop. Yeah... I guess that's a viable solution... but the zoas have already been stressed, there has to be a less stressful way. However, this is my personal preference and I'm sure most if not all of you will prefer the dip over doing nothing at all. Secondly, many of my zoas are on large pieces of rocks that make up the foundation of my rock work, I'm not rearranging the house to get a couple of pests out...

Other solutions I've read online included getting a certain types of wrasse that may hunt the nudi's and possibly using flatworm exit to poison it. I searched online for a bit for more information on the Sea Grass Wrasse and that seemed to have worked for a few people... (Blue Zoo Aquatics was the only online store I found that sold it) but I haven't found any locally, so I guess that will be my plan B.

So today I'm testing out plan A: Flatworm eXit by Salifert. (By the way, why is it cool to type it eXit instead of Exit? SAiLfERT, YOU gOT iSSuES.) Anyway, I took the carbon out of the system and poured some of this stuff into the system. Surprisingly, I saw some flatworms floating in the water columns now... very interesting... I did not know I had a flatworm problem... but can't worry about that for now. I'm still monitoring the nudi's that are crawling around and unfortunately they still seemed fine; hopefully things will change in a few hours.

On an unrelated side note, if you try to pick up a nudi with your bare hands, you could rub some of this glowing stuff on your hands. It's kind of cool, assuming I don't have to go to the ER in a few minutes. =P

Christmas in February!

Whether it'd be some prized rainbow tort or just some plain xenia, the best frags in the world are free frags... Ever since last year when I joined Atlanta Reef Club, February has turned to my holiday season. (Yes, forget December!) Last night at our club meeting, it was our annual fragging demonstration meeting, a.k.a. free frags for everyone! The turnout was crazy and even better, the corals that were being fragged were awesome.


Even though I went to the meeting not expecting anything too fancy, I still walked away with like five or six frags of various zoas, chalice, maze brain, acro's, etc. Alright, so what if my tank is stacked? Now, they're stacked even more.


If you are currently in the hobby and do not belong to a local club, I highly recommend you look one up, join, and then tell them to do a similar frag demo meeting. I think a huge part of my tank's success this past year has been due to my interactions with the community to learn and dispense advice on things I've picked up. If you guys only knew me three years ago back in college... you'd be shocked at the stupid things I've done to get my tank going... (but that's another post.)


Anyway, in the pics here, you can see the sea of frags, and not just frags, FREE frags! Needless to say, all of us are happy campers right now.


Anyway, thanks Chris for taking these photos and thank you ARC for the free frags!