Feeding your mushies.

philosophile

New member
Rhodactis mushrooms often eat with little prodding, but some varieties, along with discosama shrooms just don't seem to want to eat anything.

This isn't bad, since mushrooms take In nutrients In a variety of ways, possibly right through their skin, or trapping bacteria on mucus and sucking it up, invisibly. But corals generally grow faster and healthier when they get fed more.

Knowing this, I've always been trying to spot feed my jawbreakers (discosama mushroom) with very little success, until recently.

Soaking some very fine food (coral frenzy or reef roads or 100-200 micron golden pearls) in selcon or other liquid amino supplements seem to really stimulate eating in mushrooms ( frogspawn too if you care).

Turning off the pumps, and spot feeding the mixture, or if you can, taking out the rock and putting in a Tupperware container and feeding In there works really well. Doing it this way offers the advantage of keeping nutrients in the water column low and having your skimmer overflow with the additives. What I do is fill a Tupperware container full of freshly mixed salt water, dump that into the tank, then take an equal amount of tank water and use that to feed the corals, then the food water goes down the drain. Doing it this way should minimize salinity fluctuations, especially if you have an ATO.
 
I just turn off the pumps and put a few spectrum .5mm pellets on them, I've found they eat those better than the tiny powder food but to each their own.
 
I have several mushrooms that will not eat at all, unless they get the amino supplement. I also have plenty that will eat anything that lands on them. Do your jawbreakers eat NLS pellets? Mine sure don't, even pumps off or in a separate container.
 
Some of the FM pellets/feeding systems indicate that you should soak it in other FM products before feeding, which are essentially different mixtures of aminos, which is why I tried what I did in the first place. Since my LFS doesn't have FM, I just tried a home brew version.
 
I'm pretty sure they recommend using their other stuff so that you buy the other stuff, personally I find that it tends to pollute my tank a bit and not using additives works better, but to each their own :)
 
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