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Snorkeler's Cube

May 10th: Mithrax crabs eating my Zoas

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by
snorkeler
, 07-17-2011 at 06:23 PM (1885 Views)
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 that "fragment", and as insurance "plant it" in my quarantine tank. First I glued it to an empty shell using super glue:




And then I put it in my quarantine tank, together with the last patch of GSP I had. I was a little afraid that the super glue and my manual manipulation of the polyp would kill the Zoa, but it seems these guys are resistant. After a few hours he was opening again:



My intention was that the polyp branched out, reproduced, in the QT, but.... fast forward to today (July 17th) that hasn't happened. Probably because of water quality issues in the QT, as you'll notice through future posts... but that one polyp is still there, at least it hasn't died.

I also started feeding at night, putting a chunk of frozen seafood between the rocks where the crabs can eat it, so they satisfy their appetites and stop trying to eat my Zoas. So far it seems to be working.... for Zoa eating prevention...

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Categories
‎ Tank Entry , ‎ Propagation - fish & corals

Comments

  1. melev's Avatar
    That cute little zoa, all by itself. "Like!"
  2. Midnight's Avatar
    I like to use water from my dt in the qt tank when I do a wc.
  3. snorkeler's Avatar
    That's a good idea Midnight, I didn't do that when I did the "cold WC" I describe in the post where Mr. Six died... I used new SW which was still too cold.... stupid me.
  4. reef4me's Avatar
    Keep your eye on the crabs. The more I feed them to keep them away from zoa's , the bigger they got, the hungrier they were. It was a vicious circle. I finally brought them back to the LFS.