Ok so I did the deed. I took the caps out and treated them. However they didn't exactly fit back in. The tank cap was mostly a write off and since I still haven't really seen it looking any better I just turfed it. I know, sad. The purple cap, well lots was munched on underneath and it REALLY didn't fit. And well the more I looked at the tank without the caps, the more I liked it. So I just fragged off a large chunk and chucked the rest. If I didn't manage to eradicate the nudibranchs I don't want to give them lots to snack on anyways. The yellow cap was almost a complete write off - While some parts looked ok on the top they were completely eaten underneath and I didn't know how well they'd do. So I kept a couple of pieces that seemed to be okay and we'll see how they do.
To be honest, I wasn't really all that interested in treating the corals to begin with since I had taken that last photo of them. Before that photo was taken, I found a couple nudis and set them up for a photo and my wrasse swooped in and ate them. I set up another set and managed to get a photo before he ate those too. Then I ended up just breaking of all the layered scrolls so he could actually get into the corals and he went to town in there and I couldn't find a single one. The only thing that actually made me break down and treat was the fact that he didn't eat the eggs. And, while I've only seen them on the caps so far, I have a prized M. confusa in there that is doing fairly well, lest they move over to it and start munching.
So I followed the treatment laid out by Eric Borneman's article using potassium permanganate at 50mg/L. Man is that stuff ever purple!! I could hardly even see the coral. I guess the blue bucket didn't help though. I think he was treating them in a glass dish or something. So I didn't actually get to see the nudibranches die, but I do think I saw a few in the rinse dish. Its hard to tell as they sort of look like most of the other random gack in the bowl. Anyway, I didn't see any left on the pieces I put back in the tank, nor the eggs which hopefully disintegrated. I was kind of worried that the coral skeletons would pick up some of the purple color but they were white for the most part. The coral tissue did darken up quite a bit though. The yellow cap was a dark yellowy brown and the purple cap was just plain brown. We'll see how long it takes for them to color up.
Anyway, while I do miss having the caps in there (well the purple one anyways)the tank does look rather open and now I have room for my new frags I got a couple of weeks ago. They haven't done much in the coloring up department but I've been really babying them as they're just so damned cool. I was gonna post pics but quite frankly they just look like brown sticks and y'all will be "wtf? they're just brown sticks!". So i'll just post a pic of this one its called Tropical Paradise, A. cerealis
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