Looking at my build thread most corals have seen great growth but one has slowly shrunk. My elegance. I remember a time when these were impossible to keep. I bought an indo one in 2006 and I think it lasted a week. I've since kept a few aussie ones, when freight was a lot cheaper and they gigantic I used to frag them without incident so I know they are tough. Maybe 5 years ago I picked up this piece.
My tank has been doing really well but not quite perfect. I try and do at least one proactive thing a week to avoid becoming complacent.
Picture 1 is September 2017, picture 2 is earlier this month. Now of course sometimes its deflated, but it's never been as puffy as it was back then. I take pictures and a video of my tank at least once a month. Sure it's fun to share them here, on youtube whatever but it's also a good tool for checking the long term progress of fish and corals. Now the other obvious thing is the green leather above it is shading it out. I trimmed that last week and this week I decided to remove the elegance for cleaning.
I remember years ago when it first started growing black sponge on the bottom. I was happy because it blew around on my bare bottom. The sponge held it in place. If I had done something about it back then it would probably be much bigger by now. So I pried it off the glass and put it into about 1 gallon of tank water and started the cleaning. I used tweezers and a small knife, plus a brush. There was the black sponge, grey, yellow and more. Not to mention the baked on detritus. This is after about 1 hour of cleaning :
While I was careful I no doubt did poke the flesh a bit and caused tiny bits of damage to the skeleton so I gave it a 10 minute iodine based dip prior to putting it back and one more brush down. I probably needed another 2+hrs to get every last bit off but that wasn't going to happen today. I will see how the coral responds and if it looks better next week I'll finish the job later. It is of course possible I harmed the coral even though I was careful. One thing is for sure if I did nothing it would eventually be over taken by the sponge. Probably not for 2-3 years but it would have been a slow decline for a very nice looking coral.
All of this came off the coral!
Should be fine. I will update this later when I see it back in the reef.
My tank has been doing really well but not quite perfect. I try and do at least one proactive thing a week to avoid becoming complacent.
Picture 1 is September 2017, picture 2 is earlier this month. Now of course sometimes its deflated, but it's never been as puffy as it was back then. I take pictures and a video of my tank at least once a month. Sure it's fun to share them here, on youtube whatever but it's also a good tool for checking the long term progress of fish and corals. Now the other obvious thing is the green leather above it is shading it out. I trimmed that last week and this week I decided to remove the elegance for cleaning.
I remember years ago when it first started growing black sponge on the bottom. I was happy because it blew around on my bare bottom. The sponge held it in place. If I had done something about it back then it would probably be much bigger by now. So I pried it off the glass and put it into about 1 gallon of tank water and started the cleaning. I used tweezers and a small knife, plus a brush. There was the black sponge, grey, yellow and more. Not to mention the baked on detritus. This is after about 1 hour of cleaning :
While I was careful I no doubt did poke the flesh a bit and caused tiny bits of damage to the skeleton so I gave it a 10 minute iodine based dip prior to putting it back and one more brush down. I probably needed another 2+hrs to get every last bit off but that wasn't going to happen today. I will see how the coral responds and if it looks better next week I'll finish the job later. It is of course possible I harmed the coral even though I was careful. One thing is for sure if I did nothing it would eventually be over taken by the sponge. Probably not for 2-3 years but it would have been a slow decline for a very nice looking coral.
All of this came off the coral!
Should be fine. I will update this later when I see it back in the reef.
