#zoanthid

All hail king dorkus supreme

It's been a while since I updated you guys on the progress of my 13.5 gallon nano reef tank, Purrling Reef. Arguably you guys probably would have preferred me using this time to work on Rise Up but this was somehow nagging me more I guess. 😅

Last Tuesday on the drive back from visiting my brother K and sister-in-law E on Vancouver Island I picked up my very first corals! Yes, plural; I bought a purple and turquoise ('green') favia (likely actually favites due to taxonomy changes,) and a rasta colour morph zoanthid.

Unfortunately, I wasn't quite aware at that point that I had set up my automatic topoff (ATO) system incorrectly. For the entire life of my aquarium I had been confused at how it kept seeming to suck water out of my aquarium, which I worried was diluting its salinity.

It was.

This of course seemed to come to a head - along with some stunning lack of preparedness on my part - when I introduced the poor corals and it shamefully took me days to get my salinity from the horrible 1.018 that it was back up to 1.025 that it was suppposed to be. This past Friday I at last figured out that I needed to competely redo my ATO's hose configuration and finally, finally I had it installed correctly. No longer did the ATO's tubing have any access to my aquarium water either; at long last it could no longer remove water from my aquarium!

I made handy use of the water-side hole in my light's mounting bracket for holding the ATO's tube in place. The gunk on its interior is algae.

ATO finally fixed - and just in time for cooler fall temperatures which meant I no longer even really needed to use the damned thing, I was at last able to fix that critical salinity, yet my favia coral still appeared to be unfortunately dying.

The favia's heartbreakingly tragic progress from a beautiful vibrant coral of my dreams to just another piece of reef rock. I plan on trying again with it next spring when I may be able to source another piece of the same morph from the Lower Mainland shop that I got it from. All isn't completely lost though; while the antiparasitic dip that I treated the corals with upon their arrival almost certainly killed the vermetid snail living on the favia frag's underside, there was something else there too, which due to its biology may be okay - a mussel!

I have no idea if the mussel still lives but if it does that'd be pretty wicked honestly!

Meanwhile, I dosed the reef with calcium and magnesium; the next day, yesterday, the zoanthid coral finally opened up two of its polyps!

I believe that I may have lost one of its three polyps to my incompetence but I still have two living - if I suspect immature - polyps! I haven't secured the zoa frag in its spot yet but as I am currently kinda scared of touching the thing I think that I will give it a week or so to get acclimated before bothering it to aquarium epoxy it in place. (Most people use super glue but I don't have any at the moment. The epoxy will work too, it's just uglier.)

And yeah, the zoanthid polyps don't look like much right now, but this is what they will look like someday!

(Photo from Tidal Gardens, whose wonderful coral species spotlights on Youtube are my bible when it comes to species research. Plus the host/owner Than's voice is really soothing and ASMR-like!)

Through this whole snafu with my water chemistry - which I am still working on improving with daily dosing of Brightwell Aquatics Alkalin8.3 to bring up my aquarium's PH a point (it's at 7.3,) I also thought that I had lost one of my reef's most charismatic creatures - Captain Spook the Halloween Hermit Crab. Having found his dismembered exoskeleton, I mournfully declared him deceased, only to discover yesterday evening...

...that he was just moulting! I can't tell you how happy I was! Also I had been dead convinced that my tank had reached the ripe ol' age of six months old by now so I was berating myself as a poor reef keeper, but looking back in my reef record Purrling Reef is actually only three months old. This made me feel a lot better about myself; it's okay that my reef is looking scruffy because it is young and my research has told me that pretty much all captive reefs go through a scruffy period!

There are many different types of corals out there and it can be hard to keep track when first starting! This article is meant to break down the common types and explain why they are called as such. Soft Corals Some different types of Zoanthid corals in my home tank are shown here Soft corals are so named because they lack a hard, calcium based, skeleton to their structure. They come in all…

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