I didn't want another pink/red Acro, and I'm pretty sure it's a Spath, and I don't like Spaths either. Oh well. I'll color it up and send it back for him to re-sell. He doesn't have an Acro-friendly setup, so they just brown out there. Cultured frags aren't too bad, but anything wild or maricultured is an issue. I'll keep trying for a blue Echinata. :lol:
That pooch is quite the looker! He's pretty cute! Is he well behaved?
You won't have a prob getting that piece looking its best for another reefer to buy Mindy
I think many people make the mistake of treating spath like chunky milli. Spath color up best in much lower light than milli and their multi colored pigments are best revealed when you orient the piece so it grows towards the viewing glass. Milli's on the other hand always reveal much more of their beautiful colored scale like corallite lips if you have them growing away from your viewing window. When i say away and forwards i don't mean they have to be dead straight, i just mean you will see more colored tissue that is ALWAYS on the acro if you place them in a general sweeping arc one way or another. Sideways left or right will always give you a decent view of the pigments so that's generally a good place to start if you're unsure.
The best thing to do if you get a new wild or mari piece is sit it on a bit of pipe on the sand and turn it all different directions whilst checking out which way looks best to your eye for showing the most amount of visible pigment color on the piece. When you decide what looks best move it to a place on the sand where the flow direction is also friendly - a delicate little pastelled out table branch will thin and lose tip tissue overnight if you have the flow blowing head on - always turn them so the flow is following their growth for the first few days so they don't freak out on you. You won't see any PE even at night which will be a giveaway.
Anyway, it doesn't matter that the polyps are in while you're moving the piece around as it makes no difference to the outcome unless you have ugly polyps in which case it's a dog in any direction........
When you then find a spot just right you discover the flow is opposite to what the acro likes.......... welcome to the joys of acro scaping with branches - small frags will adapt to flow but branch ends snapped off the end of a twenty year old delicate table will most definitely spit the dummy if you upset them with bad flow when they're already upset about collection and transport ..........
I'm sure you'll get a nice echi branch sooner or later Mindy, i love echi's :thumbsup:
I think i'll have an echi ramble shortly because there's a lot more color variants out there than bloody icefire and while we're at it there is real icefire and then there's overexposed pic icefire which most have. In general there are four blue echi color variants i have seen over the years, might be more but these are what i've personally come across.
Classic icefire blue/white we all know
Light pastel blues with deeper pastel blue tips
Deep blue skin with intensely ink blue tips
All deep solid blue with fluoro polyps
The first three i can tell you exactly how to pick from each other even when pale and washed out. The fourth is down to pure arse and you get to see it if you come and visit me in person - my close inner circle of acro friends all have special pieces that we only share among each other and never show online. It's like acro fight club and the rarer or more one off the piece is, the better :thumbsup:
John is coming by Friday night to conduct some acro fight club business - only dusk lighting is permitted when trading fight club frags....... i will get in trouble for talking about it as much as i have off John so i'm not talking about it again.......... i actually made it all up......... i have no hidden pieces.......
............these are not the acros you're looking for........... :strooper:
Mannie spends all day with my mate and i working, if it's hot we leave the ute running with the aircon going and Mannie sleeps on the seat while we sweat........ yesterday i opened the ute door and said come on out for a while. He jumped down and did a wee on the bush at the rear of the ute and then walked around to the front where i was and just stared at me. I said ' what ? ' and he simply walked to the ute door and waited for me to come open it so he could get back in out of the heat. I then had to tell him to move off the drivers seat so i could get in to start the motor again for his aircon. I felt a bit used after that but we treat him like a small child tbh lol.
He's part kelpy so insane about fetching things. He drops stuff at your feet and stares at you with this insanely intense ' PICK IT UP AND THROW ITTTTTTTTTT !!!!!!!!!! ' look....... i constantly yell at him ' stop that bloody staring Mannie, i'm not a #$#@$# sheep ! '
When mom was visiting last year she thought it was cute how Mannie constantly liked to be so close to her at times when she took him for a walk that he was rubbing against her leg whilst walking. After i explained to her that Mannie was in fact treating her like a sheep and herding her in the direction he wanted her to go on their walk she didn't think it was so cute lol. When i asked her how it felt to be a sheep she reminded me i was talking to my mother........... her never ending ace in the hole comment........:deadhorse1:
I finally have 2 days off now as Mannie's pack leader came home tonight :celeb1: I will tell you why my nitrates test at 40 and phos is 0.06 suddenly due to me removing almost a third of the bio filtration in one day - pure biggles stupidity yet again........... the stuff i keep putting my acros through is why they never grow lol........:hmm4:
My sump is a disaster but i'll do a video of that so you can see exactly what i mean. I'm waiting for a bucket of red sea blue to arrive so i can take all the matrix out and wash it along with draining the sump. The display water actually smells 'green' - ever so slightly swampy or rotten sea weedy.... i have it under control i think but a few frags in the sump RTN'd which is what made me realise something was up about a week ago. They RTN'd as soon as the lights came on the morning after i swished around a bed of matrix and smelled sulphur - everything shut down and i killed the lights down to dusk only all day but the poison was in the water.
I did this right after removing all the LR in the sump - about 1/3 system total i now realise and the 1" sand bed which was about 1/4 of the system sand.
None of the matrix will be doing much at all to reduce nutrients as it's blocked with algae and filth and alive with worms. Then i drastically removed a large amount of bio surface media that was actually helping with nitrates especially and put a lot of filth in the water while i did it. I've been nursing the acros through the crazy high level nitrates until i get my hands on salt for many planned water changes.
The glass is green a few hours after cleaning and the sand has cyano and or algae on it for the first time in years......... but the acros aren't dying
