Christy's Reef

I just had a lovely saltwater shower courtesy of my fish tank. The hose from my calcium reactor had come loose (it directly feeds from my return pump line) while I was doing a water change and had the return pump off. Then start the whole thing up and here's salt in your eye. Whee. Its always fun trying to hold the hole closed while reaching for the controller to shut the whole thing down with the other. Luckily I had some help or it would have made things more interesting.

Today was definitely one of those days when I should have just left the tank alone. However I missed the water change on the weekend and figured I had better get to it or I could very well procrastinate about it right through till next weekend (which, in hindsight, would have been a smart idea).

Anyway, so I was having a look at the tank and the front left side was getting pretty crowded with the teardrop maxima and birdsnest coral so I fished out the birdsnest and attempted to push the large rock to its left over so I could make some room. No problems there it moved over quite a bit actually, then noticing that the birdsnest had a fair bit of dead skeleton towards the backside I thought I'd chop off some of that to make it smaller and take up less room. Birdsnest isn't really the type of coral to do that with. Its branches aren't seperate. Its sort of like trying to take a single branch out of a blackberry thicket. Except in this case when you cut one branch about 1/4 of the coral comes with it. Suffice it to say there were lots of little broken bits and the birdsnest is significantly smaller than it was before but it will grow back. At least its one of the consistently growing corals in my tank. Hasn't returned to its former glorious color but at least it grows. The teardrop maxima hs much more room now, it seems happer but really I can never tell with that damned clam. Its not really responsive to light much and you really have to manhandle it to get it to close, and even then it doesn't close all the way. I'm not sure if thats a good thing or what. Oh well, its still kicking and I guess thats whats important.

So while I was working on all that I had a good look at my orange cap, which was once a rather lovely piece but after being shaded out by my yellow cap which seems to grow in leaps and bounds (or rather it used to, I've noticed its hurtin' lately). So it was dead in a few parts but trying to hang on. I ended up fragging it as it really did look terrible and was mostly a landing pad for detritus which was also killing it. Its now in 3 pieces the size of twoonies. It will come back again. I just have to remember to nail it down so it doesn't get lost again.

I also noticed that my powder blue seems to be relatively normal again, none of that weird skin condition which was rather prevalent in the last few weeks/month. It had sort of a bubbly look to it but I notice now that its nice and smooth like it should be. Not sure if I just healed up or if it was something I did as I've been supplementing his diet with freshwater daphnia and garlicy mysis. I'm just happy to see that he's healthy looking again.

Oh and the neon goby is still in the overflow. I was going to attempt a rescue mission tonight but its a good thing I didn't, the tank probably would have exploded or something. Maybe I'll try tomorrow. He doesn't look worse for wear in there, probably having a feast on all the copepods :)