Christy's Reef

Lately I've been noticing that more than just a few of my acros are turning white at the base. A little more seems to be receeding every couple of days. In fact, one of my acros has little bits removed around the base, yet those bits that are left over form little polyp islands which are doing fine and have been for weeks. Strange yet true. This one has been deteriorating for weeks, while this one is the latest victim. I've deduced that I have a SPS eating crab somewhere in the tank, well, that and I've actually seen the little bugger. He's grey and he is hairy and he only comes out late at night. I didn't get a chance to see the color of his eyes but quite frankly I don't care. He has got to go.

So today I intercepted the crap out of the tank while I was at work. Well not overly but I did use more than the regular dose and I did it for about 9 hours or so. I notice that my sump hermits are still cruising along. Little bastages, I was hoping they'd croak too. I suppose they aren't doing any harm in the sump, yet I always feel they are plotting against me. No doubt to take out my skimmer pump or something. "Dude! Throw your shell in there and we'll really mess her up! Muahahahah!" See what I mean? ;)

Ha! I just found the little bugger, and I do mean little! My photographic evidence sucks arse though, he's kind of behind some other stuff. He looks remarkably less hairy and not brown at all. I wonder if 9 hours of death will do that to a crab that quickly? I hope that is him because really, doing an interceptor treatment is a huge pain in the ass. Mostly the water change afterwards. I hate doing water changes and doing a 30 gallon waterchange in my house is a total bitch. I always get water EVERYWHERE! Oh BTW, I did remove all my acro crabs before the treatment (still happily crabbing away in their removable colonies) and put them in the refugium that I took offline.

Hmm, this one has no claws, is white (like faded from its original color due to death) and well they're ain't much left to separate it from a moult. Bugga. No doubt he was feeling a little off and exposed himself to the elements, namely, my wrasse who probably pounced the minute he showed his evil little head.

You know, as an aside, I must say, that interceptor stuff doesn't kill much except for the acro crabs. I still have about a billion copepods hanging out in my overflow, where they're mucking about in the thick algae. While I was doing my massive post-interceptor waterchange, I started to haul some of the algae out of there (that I could reach) and there were tons of pods cruising around on the algae bits. I wonder if I'm not dosing heavily enough? Then again, I did manage to kill all the acro bugs I had previously, so it must be okay.

Well that was my excitement for the evening. I suppose I should get a new tank shot up there but I think that one is fairly recent. Well except for the missing purple cap. You'll have to be content with this substandard photo I took yesterday.