Tank Entry

It has been a while since I last posted, mostly due to lack of time due to work overload.

Which obviously meant I also had little time to take care of the tank, and it went backwards.

My 4 mithrax crabs gradually died (of age I believe), leaving me without valonia eaters, which isn't good. One of the mithrax crabs (the hardiest of them, last to die) apparently was of a different species and I caught him eating my zoa colony. Moved him to the sump a month ago, and I ...

June 25th was a very sad Saturday... I went with my kid to LFS2 to buy a plastic decoration for our QT, something that gave my exiled six-line wrasse better hiding options than the white PVC tubes I had in the QT. My kid chose a cute treasure chest with octopus, with several holes in some vases an in the chest. Would be perfect, good looking and great for hiding in.
...

On June 4th at night I added two peppermint shrimp to the tank, and they gradually ate up all the Aiptasias. And there were a lot... but they got rid of them, all of them.

Well, to be honest they ate all but one, the large, no, huge, Aiptasia you saw in a previous blog post. So I decided to manually remove than one and put it in a flower vase for my amusement. This picture was after a week it was in the vase, it climbed up from the bottom to that position:
...

Talking to my favorite LFS about my Aiptasia blues (which they were aware of given my shrimp purchases) one of the guys (Maciel, great guy, really) offered to lend me a fish trap, explained how to operate it and encouraged me to try.

Cool, it did seem pretty simple in theory, if I had enough patience. I'll show a picture right below, but, in summary it was an acrylic box with a sliding door. Maciel told me: "man, just put the trap in there without the door, fix it to the glass ...

You might recall that on Feb 13th I caught my Mithrax crabs eating my Green Star Polyps. Well, in May I noticed my Zoa seemed to be missing some polyps... but I wasn't sure, so I started to take pictures. It didn't take much to confirm.... on May 10th I noticed though the pictures that a few polyps were really missing.... and coincidently I found one polyp loose on the substrate.

Must have been a polyp the crab cut loose but wasn't able to hold.

So, I decided to take ...