Big Bully

[nUgZ]

Well...I had a leak at the bottom seam on the tank. I decided I would switch tanks yesterday. It ended up taking more than 5 hours to complete the whole process. Way more involved than I had planned. I put everything back in the same places they were before the move, and expected everything to do OK. All the corals were pretty ****ed off and I'm sure they were releasing all kinds of warnings to their neighbors. It was too late for me to go buy some carbon since it took so much longer than I had planned, so when I woke up this morning I had a little surprise. My Acan hillae is the bully in the tank, but had been behaving quite well for several weeks. Last night he decided to consume one of my Aussie Lords...GREAT CHOICE!!! I've left the lord in the tank to see if anything survives. Here's a before...

Here's the after...

Here's the culprit. You can see the Aussie to the left in this pic. It had been there for weeks without a problem.

I guess we'll see what happens. Everything else is doing fine though. I guess it could have been worse.

 

[Solitaryensis]

Hmmmm...certainly not positive but I dont think the acan "ate" the other one. Looks like there was some warfare or it just died. Im leaning towards death from the transfer.

 

[nUgZ]

No...it ate the Aussie. They send out their mesentery fillaments(their digestive organ) and consume the threat. That's what's happening when there is "warfare". When I came down in the morning it still had a grasp on the Aussie.

 

[GoingPostal]

Yeah that looks just like my brain the day after my orange crush landed on them. Thankfully they only ate half and the brain is almost fully recovered. Not so sure about the likelihood of that acan coming back, is there anything left under the goo?
The green one in this pic is the victim, this is a week or two after it happened. I moved the acan to another less-crowded tank as this was it's second victim.

 

[nUgZ]

The goo is still there, but I'm going to leave it in the tank for a while. I've seen corals come back from a bare skeleton before, so there is hope. This wasn't the hillae's first victim...more like it's fifth, but I just love it.