Ricordea Mushroom is becoming stringy in the middle

arlong1

AC Members
May 3, 2007
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Just recently purchased a ricordea mushroom 2 days ago and now recently the middle of coral is becoming completely white and stringy instead of having the nice colorful bumps that ricordeas usually have. I was wondering if these were just the tentectables or whether the coral was dying or falling apart.
 
One of my other mushrooms had that, then the next day, it fell apart... I dunno if it was from the ammonia spike, or if there was something wrong with it...
 
Thanks for th reply, were you able to save it? Right now the ricordea is causing my water to be pretty cloudy and if there's no way to save it, I want to remove it before it pollutes the tank too much.
 
When a mushroom starts spewing its inards (the white stringy stuff), it's usually a result of some kind of stress. I've had mushrooms do this as a result of pouring top-off water into the area of the tank where they are located, as well as adding freshly mixed sw to their area of the tank during a water change. After realizing I was causing this, I adjusted the way I do things to keep it from happening again. In either case, the effect only lasted for about a day and things were normal again.

I have been told, and believe that it happened in my own tank, a new mushroom can grow from the spewed inards. Within a week of causing the white stringy insides to spew out of several mushrooms (definitely were the inards, not some egg / sperm form of reproduction), I had an explosion of new mushrooms in that part of the tank as well as on other rocks distant from the colony.

I don't know if ricordia do that for the same reasons as a regular mushroom, but I would imagine they aren't all that different in their response to stress. I've yet to see any of our rics spew their inards, but then again I'm much more careful than I use to be.

I wouldn't be in too big of a rush to pull it out of your tank.
 
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