New mushrooms question

[barjam]

Over the weekend I bought a rock with some blueish green mushrooms on it that were what I would call medium sized. They were under an overhang in a tank with hallide lights. I get them home and put them under 160 watts of NO light (75 gallon) and they (after opening up) were twice the size and all brown.

Is this normal? Not enough light?

 

[t_wolf323]

Could be, it could also be that they are not happy yet. Try and put them as close to the top as possible.

 

[kiknchikn]

I've found that mushrooms look very different under different color temperatures of lights and at different levels of, for a lack of a better term, "openess". I have a purple mushroom with blue spots that was no where near as nice looking in the store. This same mushroom goes from purple when it is half open to an ugly shade of red-brown when it is fully expanded. The color varies with the concentration of Zooxanthellae I guess.

 

[drummereef]

Yeah, depends on the lighting from the store to your tank. I bought a rock of what I thought were normal purple shrooms and in a day they were a beautiful green color. With NO light I would put them out in open light or near the top and see what happens.

 

[barjam]

I noticed this moring that with the tank lights off they are a bright blue and a similar size to what they were at the LFS.

Even though they were under halide at the LFS they were somewhat under an overhang. So believe it or not I think that in my tank they are getting too much light or at least too much light to remain blue.

Another issue may be spectrum as I have 2x6500k daylight and 2xactinic where it looked like the LFS probably had very blue MH (14k perhaps).

 

[drummereef]

Yeah, I'd probably find them some shade and see what happens. Post a pic when you get a chance!

 

[barjam]

I need to research how to take pictures of stuff in the tank first. Every time I try it ends up looking like a really bad webcam pic

 

[kiknchikn]

I don't do anything special for my pics and they turn out OK. I just set my camera (KONICA MINOLTA DiMAGE Z5) to fixed-zoom macro mode and let the auto-focus do its thing. When it looks clear I snap a pic.. then move the camera so it has to refocus again and then I take another pic. I do that 5 or 6 times, and usually one of them looks pretty good. This only works for pics of things within 6 or 7 inches from the glass for me.

I'm not a photographer by any means, however, so I'm not sure if I'm doing anything right. Here are a couple of my pics though: