coral restoration projects 1 and 2

[omeg]

Hi,

In order to learn more about corals, I've undertaken two projects to restore these two pieces back to their glory days. If you have any advice, I would gladly accept them.

Project A: I found this guy on a rock covered with slime. Had to gently scrap some of the slime off him. Been in my tank for about 3 weeks. I'm not doing much other than providing him with a place to live and cleaning the area around him so he can start to grow out more. Anyone know what this is?

Project B: Some sun coral that is probably not going to make it. Got it hoping to revive it - I hope he pulls through..

To restore this guy, I've used the salt water slurry bath where I soak him in food rich water for about 2 hours each day. Those skeletons don't look to promising though.....

 

[NicoleC]

I see tentacles on the sun coral, so the coral will survive. It will generally not regrow over it's old skeleton, though. Keep the food really, really small and you may have to manually feed each tentacle that will come out for a while. If it can't hold on to the food (tentacles not sticky, you will need to use gravity to hold the food on the tentacles until it can injest it.

This sounds horrible, but they recover surprisingly fast.

If you do good, it may not regrow flesh over the skeleton, but the individual polyps should survive and grow out. At that point, it may reproduce by sending runners through the rock and you'll see babies pop up. Like this:

 

[Wilafur]

^^hehe, to the untrained eye, those look like yellow aips.

 

[omeg]

Sun coral doing a bit better today.... I'll keep updates on these two guys coming. Today's menu consists of finely chopped/minced seabass.