Snorkeler's Cube

My tank hasn't seen much action lately, I have't been very good on the maintenance, but there is one thing I take pleasure in it: observing the balance between algae and mithrax crabs.

I have two distinct areas with green hair algae, and a few areas now sparsely populated by with red bubble algae. The hair algae grows, then the crabs eat it and you see less of it, the reb bubble sometimes makes gains on a rock, a few weeks later thet are gone, the mithrax ate it.

I'm going to try to post to Youtube an HD video I make in November of the mithrax eating red bubble algae. Some people have doubts if they eat them, well, they do.

It is cool, I like this. A fairly balanced ecosystem. The algae are not getting out of control dominating everything, neither are the crabs starving and dying.

I've kept my feeding well limited, I have found a way of releasing the pellets in the flow of an MP10 so that almost all of the pellets are eaten and very few fall to the floor.

Another thing I'd like to coment about are Aiptasias. Remember I had a lot of them, including in my sump, then I got two peppermint shrimp who ate them all in the display tank,but I still had them in the sump? Well, more or less three months ago I noticed the sump seemd to be aiptasia free. Not sure why, maybe because I spent a few months without lighting the sump except for a little blue leds, so the aiptasias starved? Maybe they're still there, just "hiding"?

Well, in mid movember the last of that peppermint shrimp pair died, and since then no Aiptasias have been found in my tank. I'm observing, I believe they will show up again in the display tank some point in the future, let's see.