You should make an effort to feed your trumpets if you are not. They can shrink pretty quickly if they are not getting food. Even in a friends 220 tank w/ lots of halide, his shrunk and eventually died. I just rescued a nice big frag too from what I think was starvation because after only a week of feeding it seems the heads doubled in size.
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Wow, it's been a year and a half since I posted? Shame on me. Since then, life's changed. Been in the middle of a divorce for over a year now, went through a rough patch where I didn't take care of myself or my tank, lost a lot of stuff and just kept getting frustrated. Things are looking up though.
I still have the one clown and the pink spotted watchman goby. I also have a variant of Kenya Tree that was almost invisible to the naked eye about a year ago, growing on original liverock from when I started the tank 2 years ago, never noticed it, but in the last year it went from microscopic to huge trunks, it even self-split into about 20 small frags that floated around. I gathered a bunch up and 'planted' them on frag plugs to try and stop them from getting too out of hand. Most of my green button polyps died in the 'bad period', but about 12 survived.
The 4.36W light upgrade was a failure. Even with 2 bigger fans running they kept overheating and blasting bulbs. So I have since removed my entire hood and mounted a AI Nano with controller and the light that thing throws off is insane. It doesn't "look" as bright as the original hood, because of the harder shadows from point lighting, but I can't even run it full blast without starting to cause bleaching so I had to back it way down to around 75%. The lighting seems to have a massive effect on the 12 remaining green button polyps as they're certainly growing now.
I also refreshed my hermit/snail population but I'm completely flabbergasted at what's happened in the last month or so. I had about 5 medium cerinths, 2 existing and 3 that came with the refresher pack. 4 of the 5 have died in the last month, but it doesn't appear to be natural causes. Everytime one dies, there's a web, almost like a mucus web like you'd see with vermentids. Then one time, there was a neon green 'tentacle', maybe 2-3 inches long, about half as big as a pencil, sticking out from under the rock by the webbing and the empty snail shell. I went to look at it straight down from the top and when I jostled the lid (which was still on at this point) it zipped back under the rock and I didn't want to tear down my rockscape to find it. I've been researching and not turning up any idea of what it could be. It seems to leave all the smaller snails alone, and the fish have been fine for 2 years. There's been no liverock additions for it to hitchhike on in almost a year and a half. I'm puzzled.
Annnnyway, my next plans are to make a better top for the tank, I have plexiglass cut to fit right now but it's too thin (it's as thick as they had at the store that day) so it warps and I have to flip it over, then it warps the other way over 4-5 days, and to try and fit a sump under the stand and plumb it in so I can start running a skimmer and a better fuge.
I'll try and get some pictures, but the wife took the camera when she left so all I have is my cruddy cell phone camera. Oh well.
So, in an attempt to bring the tank back to life I stopped at a fish store that I haven't been to in the past but it's been on my list for some time. It's called Best Fish in downtown Milwaukee. A coworker is friends with the owners. I guess they sold it a couple years back and were renting the space to the new owner, he just crapped the place up, so they kicked him out and started their store up again. It's tiny, cramped, but the prices are insane and the quality of what he has is awesome. It was a dead give away to me that it must be good because one of the guys from the other LFS I go to was there buying stuff for his tank (which says a lot about that LFS to me).
So I left with a small frag of hammer coral, 3 branches of trumpet on a plug, a small plug of xenia, and a small rock with a nice looking red velvet mushroom on it.
I think, after I put these in my tank this afternoon, that I might want to re-scape the tank. I've never been one for piling rock against the back wall, but with the size of it and the hard shadows from the new LED lights, I might have to consider something more that direction. Maybe a rear wall pile with a peninsula overhang for the goby to dig under...
So here's some pictures of the frags I picked up Sunday. Don't mind the quality, all I have is a cell phone camera right now. You can also see compared to my earlier pics how much light that AI Nano throws down. I also forgot to clean the glass before I took these so ignore the small lines on the glass.
Whole tank as the 'day' cycle is at peak.
Kenya tree that is splitting like it's going out of style.
New xenia frag and red velvet mushroom.
Small hammer frag.
Nice fat trumpet coral frag. One's a little deflated since they were put in an hour before the shot, they're both at full extension now and there's a smaller polyp on the back side.
Something has been killing off my nerite snails at an amazing pace. One day I saw what I thought was a green tentacle (see 4-19-12 post above) eating one. Well today I caught the dang thing on camera. It's a worm. Check out what I saw when I walked downstairs...
Thing must think it's a bungee jumper when it eats. Suffice to say that rock is now in a bucket of fresh water to see if it comes out. When I pulled it out it scampered so I'm hoping it didn't make it to another rock before I got the bucket.
It looks like a typical bristle to me, the segment shapes are sort of diamond when it stretches out with small hairs coming out the points of the diamond, it was similar color to a normal bristle too, just big. Maybe a small DIY trap would work.
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Soaked the rock for a couple hours in freshwater and nothing crawled out of it. Boo.
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