finding a nice spot for a blastomussa...

Sk8r

Staff member
RC Mod
My lfs just for the first time got Australian corals.
I have an lps tank that grows euphyllias like mad. The one acan is developing new eyes. The new duncan is madly happy and coloring up, eating like a pig.

The blastomussa has been accident-prone. I set it in the sandbed---it falls over when a crab walks past. I set it another place, it shriveled up drastically, exposing ribs, because it didn't like the direct light OR the looming hammer. I set it in the sand in a shadier spot on the other side---and a fighting conch came and knocked it over.

I was beginning to despair of it. I set its poor little frag plug into a forked bit of coral rubble 6" off the sandbed and it spread out to twice its previous size and it's starting to do so dependably.

It's kind of tabasco-colored, and it's finally showing some edge structure, like feeding tentacles. The happier one the lfs was showing off was Easter-egg pink and he said it was the same thing. Never had one of these before, but I seem finally to have made it happy.

Now we'll see.
 
blastmousa are my one of my favorites. They like to be fed. So feed it twice a week and you should see babies poping..Also make sure it gets indirect flow. Direct strong flow will tear their skin.
 
I like blastos, but they're more particular of location than most of my corals. Lower light and low flow and they seem to do okay. I have mine just off the side of the return from the sump, out of the direct current from any of the power heads. It's the opposite end of the tank from the frogspawn and corals with sweepers.

Mine really open with just the actinics on, and close a little when the second set of bulbs (10,000K) kicks in. But I don't really have any lower light area in my tank. I do feed them, they love the Fauna Marin and Reef Chili foods as well as some of my home-made food.

Hope it helps.

Jeff
 
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Yeah , it took a while before I found a good spot for my blastomussa merletti. I mounted mine on a branching rock so it sticks out into the middle of the water column so some light gets to the base on all sides. now I see a lot of new growth of new polyps under the older heads.

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Ahh, sorry for that double post!
 
really nice.

I did find out they're quite an extraordinary mine canary for an alkalinity/magnesium drop. I had mg run out on my kalk drip arrangement, and alk plummeted. The blasto put me onto it within a very few hours, and as a result I corrected matters so fast it hardly made a blip in its universe. It is now happy again.
 
Yeah, who needs test kits when we have our corals to let us know what is going on.
It is kind of amazing how anyone in this hobby for a while can read their tanks just by looking at the condition of thier livestock!
 
What are you feeding your Blasto's and how?Are you pipetting food near them or on them; are you feeding into the sump and then turning the pumps off so the food can settle on them?
 
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