Need Advice (Nano Reef)

[Andrew225]

Eh, can't identify any of the rocks...

I feelyour pain with the blurry camera, mine's jsut as bad. A pain to try and get decent pics. Blegh.

As for the worm...If it were me, personally, i'd take the rock he's in, and put it in a bucket with water at about 1.12 SG. Iv'e noticed that if the SG is lower, alot of Inverts shoot out, trying to find a more suitable area. If that didn't work, i'd try some iodine as well...And agian ,if -that- didn't work, i'd just toss the rock and suck up havign to buy a new piece to replace it. It would suck, but for my corals, oh man woudl it be worth it lol

I'm assumign this is your first SW? As it turns out, i did fresh for two years before starting up my own 12 gallon , so i mgiht be able tohel pwith any problems or questions you have.

 

[Kashta]

Eh, can't identify any of the rocks...

I feelyour pain with the blurry camera, mine's jsut as bad. A pain to try and get decent pics. Blegh.

As for the worm...If it were me, personally, i'd take the rock he's in, and put it in a bucket with water at about 1.12 SG. Iv'e noticed that if the SG is lower, alot of Inverts shoot out, trying to find a more suitable area. If that didn't work, i'd try some iodine as well...And agian ,if -that- didn't work, i'd just toss the rock and suck up havign to buy a new piece to replace it. It would suck, but for my corals, oh man woudl it be worth it lol

I'm assumign this is your first SW? As it turns out, i did fresh for two years before starting up my own 12 gallon , so i mgiht be able tohel pwith any problems or questions you have.

Haha... those rocks are crabs! Really, I promise... lmao. That awful worm is living in probably one of the best rocks I have in the tank. So I'll have to do everything I can to keep the rock and still eliminate the worm.

Yes, it's my first saltwater tank. I bought a used 110 gallon recently (still empty) and planned to go FOWLR with that after I learn all about this and gradually accumulate the equipment/supplies it will need. But then, I couldn't resist this 12g aquapod I found for sale a couple of weeks ago. He was asking $250 so I low-balled a $150 offer, mostly on impulse. Didn't think he'd sell that low, but he did... so here I am now with a full blown but quite fragile reef. After learning how badly neglected this was for so long, I truly expected to lose everything... but for the price it was still worth it. If all else fails, I know I can clean up the mess and start over from scratch. Now, by the time I can afford to get that big tank running, maybe I'll have learned enough to make it a reef, too. Do it all myself from start to finish.

I know this little tank is quite bare. It's basically just live rock and sand with whatever hitchhikers are left that have managed to survive this long. But it's still teeming with life and activity. I'm just fascinated.

This morning, I watched a small brittle star come out of his hole to cast out the empty skeleton of an amphipod he must have eaten. Then he went back in. That was it.. no big deal. But still amazing to watch it happen. And every time I look in there, I see something new. I just watched what appeared to be an ordinary looking worm stretch out to grab stuff off the rocks. It's mostly translucent and has some black rings around it.... and the tip ends like a mouth inside a circle of short feelers. But when it retracted, the extended length of it telescoped back into itself. It has some kind of rigid or tubular outer surface. Something else now I'll need to identify.

There's something else that appeared today. A single crab claw sticking up from the sand. It wasn't there yesterday. It's quite large and doesn't match the big crab... and it's much bigger than the little ones I've seen so far. No other signs of a newly molted shell anywhere to be seen. The 3 other crabs still accounted for. Maybe something in the sand bed pushed it up or another crab I haven't seen has molted or had his claw pulled off by.... <yeesh> who-knows-what.

 

[Andrew225]

Lol. Yeah, baout the first...Oh, three weeks i had the tank, i didnt' even bother trying to stock it. I just watched and waited

Once even had a dead colony of Star coral (Hard coral.) Four weeks later, it had gone from white to half white-half brown. Brown side was alive. All kinds of crazy stuff like that.

 

[Kashta]

I just watched what appeared to be an ordinary looking worm stretch out to grab stuff off the rocks. It's mostly translucent and has some black rings around it.... and the tip ends like a mouth inside a circle of short feelers. But when it retracted, the extended length of it telescoped back into itself. It has some kind of rigid or tubular outer surface. Something else now I'll need to identify.

That was easy... it's one of the Sipunculid peanut worms.