Hi everyone.
Since about 6 months ago I have a very nice Goniopora colony. it's been growing nicely.
I've been reading a lot about it. And, of course, mostly everyone were saying "impossible to keep coral".
How much i understood, the trickiest part is how to trick Goniopora to eat. Mostly everyone says mixture of Phyto and Zoo plankton etc.... because Goniopora has very small membranes... and can't swallow bigger food.
And that is what I was doing these 6 months - giving them mostly plankton food.
And then today, I noticed something very interesting:
-Because I spoiled my Cardinalfish with raw shrimp meat (she doesn't wants to eat anything else now :mad2
, one piece of that shrimp meat fell into the Goniopora colony today.
I expected that it will float away with the current, but instead, what happened was that polyps grabbed the meat and didn't let it go.
Piece of meat was around 6-7 millimeters in diameter (sorry, I am from Europe, so I am more accustomed to a metric system)
As you see on the picture few polyps literally surrounded the meat:
Then, somehow, they managed to rip the piece of meat into 2 smaller pieces:
Then two polyps started eating those 2 pieces:
Then, again, it looked like other polyps want to snatch the meat from first polyps....
Eventually they managed to swallow the meat! If you look carefully at last picture, you'll notice meat in the middle of open polyp's mouth going inside the polyp.
Phone camera can't show it realistically enough, but you can still see it, and trust me I know what I saw hehehehe. Also polyps were swaying in the current, so it was very hard to make good pics.
I was shocked seeing this.
Learning about Goniopora, I never expected this to happen. Maybe it happened before as well, but I didn't pay attention.
The whole event was almost TWO HOURS long though.
My cleaner shrimp was on the other size of the tank at that time, so it couldn't steal the meat from Goniopora.
So, what I learned today is:
1. If Goniopora likes your tank conditions IT WILL EAT. And it will eat even bigger pieces of food.
2. It will eat VERY SLOW - which will give plenty time to other tank inhabitants to steal it's food.
- I will try these days to chop shrimp meat into smaller pieces and offer them again to goniopora and then monitor what will happen.
Since about 6 months ago I have a very nice Goniopora colony. it's been growing nicely.
I've been reading a lot about it. And, of course, mostly everyone were saying "impossible to keep coral".
How much i understood, the trickiest part is how to trick Goniopora to eat. Mostly everyone says mixture of Phyto and Zoo plankton etc.... because Goniopora has very small membranes... and can't swallow bigger food.
And that is what I was doing these 6 months - giving them mostly plankton food.
And then today, I noticed something very interesting:
-Because I spoiled my Cardinalfish with raw shrimp meat (she doesn't wants to eat anything else now :mad2
, one piece of that shrimp meat fell into the Goniopora colony today.I expected that it will float away with the current, but instead, what happened was that polyps grabbed the meat and didn't let it go.
Piece of meat was around 6-7 millimeters in diameter (sorry, I am from Europe, so I am more accustomed to a metric system)
As you see on the picture few polyps literally surrounded the meat:
Then, somehow, they managed to rip the piece of meat into 2 smaller pieces:
Then two polyps started eating those 2 pieces:
Then, again, it looked like other polyps want to snatch the meat from first polyps....
Eventually they managed to swallow the meat! If you look carefully at last picture, you'll notice meat in the middle of open polyp's mouth going inside the polyp.
Phone camera can't show it realistically enough, but you can still see it, and trust me I know what I saw hehehehe. Also polyps were swaying in the current, so it was very hard to make good pics.
I was shocked seeing this.
Learning about Goniopora, I never expected this to happen. Maybe it happened before as well, but I didn't pay attention.
The whole event was almost TWO HOURS long though.
My cleaner shrimp was on the other size of the tank at that time, so it couldn't steal the meat from Goniopora.
So, what I learned today is:
1. If Goniopora likes your tank conditions IT WILL EAT. And it will eat even bigger pieces of food.
2. It will eat VERY SLOW - which will give plenty time to other tank inhabitants to steal it's food.
- I will try these days to chop shrimp meat into smaller pieces and offer them again to goniopora and then monitor what will happen.
