Mushrooms melting!

aromantis

New member
Hey, guys. I'm sort of new to mushrooms, and can't figure out why mine are melting. I already have a mushroom that came as a hitchhiker in some chaeto thats doing fine, and even recently divided. But for some reason, I got a rock with some cool looking shrooms on it, and they are now melting, and seem to be turning into red slime. Even stranger, only a few of them are doing it, some of the new arrivals look fine, but still haven't opened.

Now, I don't know if it is actually a mushroom as opposed to a ric or yuma, I just know it has tightly packed, tiny, spherical tentacles.

The lighting is 1 true actinic 03, and one 10000k daylight compact fluorescent. Any ideas?
 
how many watts? over what size tank?

id siphon away any slime and dead or dying mushroom bits and then do a water change.

if its a really new piece then it may be a disease and might not be your fault.
 
130 watts over a standard 20 gallon. I thought that too, but it looked sensational in the lfs. Perfectly healthy from what I could tell. I also bought a tiny porcelain crab to see if it would host in them, but it has since disappeared. Could these two events be related?

Edit: Also, is it normal for the mushrooms to not fully open for the first couple of days?
 
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I'll do the tests tomorrow, when there's actual light to read with. Anyway, I took the rock out and put it in a tupperware container in which I proceeded to scrape off as much of the slime piles as possible. I also used a syringe to blow off any remnants. It's now sitting in a bucket with a ton of live sand and saltwater until morning, because I'm too tired to put it back in right now.

As a side note, when I took it out it honestly smelled like fecal matter. :worried: Not sure if that helps ID what's going on here, but figured it couldn't hurt... or could it? LOL
 
Well after spending another half an hour rescrubbing the entire rock, I reintroduced it. One of the polyps fell off after a few hours, one is still not open, but I think thats because it pushed against another rock, and two have opened nice and big. They're maroon with neon green bubbles that look like very short fuzz towards the center, and turn into definate bubbles more space out towards the rim. Any ID?
 
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