fwiw : you dont CHOOSE a place or rock for a mag. It does what it wants...if its happy with light,flow -it will stay put...if not it will wander all over your tank until it finds the right place..
Thank you for your input, I do know this part but my Mag is confusing me.
I have a 6 foot long 180 with 2 MP40s on 100% reef crest. Flow is also provided by the return. My light fixture is 3x250W halides and 4 T5s (6 foot fixture, so whole tank is lit).
I purpose-built a tower in the center for the Mag. But with the top flat rock detachable for quick removal. When I brought the Mag home, I put it in a 10 gallon QT set up ready to dose cipro if it showed signs of sickness (this is not the first Mag I've dealt with but it's the first apparently healthy one). I had placed the flat top rock from the DT tower in the QT so that it could eventually be transferred without any detaching and reattaching. It immediately attached to this rock and stretched its foot to cover the entire surface. This rock is roughly an oval (with irregular edges) and measures 8 inches long at its longest and 7 inches at its widest. After a few days of observation in the QT with no detaching, no mouth slackness and no deflation, we popped it into the display. It has been in there for over a month and stayed on that rock but continually readjusted its foot. It also always seems to have a good portion of its verrucae holding on. Like half of it would be in classic upright Mag posture and the other half would be attached by verrucae. Within the last week it has been getting more and more "tender-footed" (for lack of a better term). So shifting around a lot on that rock and never covering more than about half of it (though we know its foot can cover the entire thing edge-to-edge from the QT. I popped a piece of eggcrate on top of the tank between nem and lights to see if it acted happier with less light. We tried reducing the flow. We tried reducing the light period. It continued to shift around but stay on that rock. I noticed that it seemed to be starting to hold one section of its foot up off the rock. That section of foot showed no visible injury but it kept that one section up and unattached. I did lots of research and stumbled across something that said that sometimes the composition of a rock can be caustic to the nem. I know little about the origins of this particular rock as it came from the tank of a fellow reefer (but a long time ago and it is fully cycled), it is porous and light and appears to be an appropriate marine rock as it has tubeworm casings and bits of shells in it like a reef rock should. As I was considering this possibility and continuing to watch the Mags behaviour, it started the deflation cycle. I popped the top rock off and extremely gently used flow to get it to let go of the rock over about 30 minutes. I figured that if it was going back into QT for treatment and I was already unsure about the rock, I'd put it on an inverted glass plate that I have specifically for nem QT. It has now been in QT and treatment for 3 days. It stopped deflating immediately upon treatment and looks happy and healthy in every way except that it is still holding up that same section of foot (rest of foot is attached to glass plate). Now that it is in a QT tank, I can see that section of foot up close and brightly lit. I can't see any sloughing of tissue, any injury or any abnormal morphology of the foot or column in that area. I am continuing to treat until a full course of cipro has been administered but I am unsure where to go from there if it is still holding it's foot up like that. The Mag is at least 12 inches in diameter. It is not bleached at all, the tentacles are and always have been that deep brownish-tan colour of a healthy zoanthellae-filled creature (yellow tips and very pale lilac column)
So the questions I have in my head are:
1. Is it possible that the rock I provided is too small?
2. Is it possible that the rock I provided was in some way "caustic" or injurious to the nem's foot? (Because I have seen it fully attached but it no longer fully attaches).
3. Is it possible to give a Mag too much flow and too much light? An unbleached Mag specifically.
4. If it continues to hold that one section of its foot up, should I hold off on returning it to the DT after treatment?
Happy to hear any thoughts or opinions,
-Sarah
