Yellow Tonga Leather Splitting

[delor]

I have been watching my yellow tonga leather slowly seperate into two. The top is 2 completely different pieces now but there is still one spot about an inch long on the base that is connected. I the very bottom is already on 2 different pieces of rock, so once they completely seperate, I will have 2! Now the hard part is deciding whether to keep both or use one to trade for something different. I am really amazed at how yellow my leather is compared with others I have seen in LFS. Anyone else have a leather split naturally?

 

[superfirefly]

My Sarcophyton has been splitting for the last three months. It is not far behind yours. the top is held together by about a 1/2 inch of tissue and the base is held together by about an inch of tissue. I wish I would have taken pictures of the process it has been a lot of fun to watch but over 3 months it is very slow. It really freaked me out when it first started to get a huge hole in it.

 

[delor]

Superfirfly- Glad to hear that mine isn't the only one. It is an amazingly slow process. I didn't even realize it until the top was 2 different pieces (it was so convuluted anyway). What type of lighting do you keep your under? Mine is under 440W VHO and in the upper 3rd of the tank. I usually have great polyp extension making the entire thing look "fuzzy", much more so than ones I have seen at various LFS.

 

[superfirefly]

Mine is under 196W PC. I keep it in the upper portion of the tank. It started to split right after I had fragged it. When I upgraded my lighting the "trunk" for lack of a better term, got really long so I just cut it in half. Then 1 - 2 weeks later what was the top half started to develope a hole in the center of it.

My polyps were very long and thick but then an incident with baking soda burned the tips off and it is now only about 50% recoverd.

My leather also has a colony of comb jellies living on it. I will be interested to see if they will migrate to the other half or not. I really do like watching the jellies at night when they are feeding so I am hopefull they do spread.

 

[delor]

That is cool about the jellies. My skunk cleaner regularly cleans the crevices of my leather. I would love to see some pictures of the jelly "infested" leather.

 

[getoyute]

My leather is splitting also!! after paying close attention to it today I noticed the upper portion is completely split and the bottom 1" to the rock connects both pieces so I decided to search the topic and what do you know I find this thread. My leather is kept under 4X96 watt PCs (dual 10K, dual Actinic) and it is placed close the middle of the tank.