First mushroom care?

Laura and Jim will be hosting the May meeting this Saturday the 12th and it will be the usual of food, drinks, raffle and fun.
 
Doors will be open at 6:00 pm for social talk and the meeting will start at 7:00.  Parking gets a little tight and the city says you can't park on 4th but there is a parking lot a block away.   Meeting is usually held in the backyard so feel free to bring your favorite lawn chair, weather permitting of course.

If you need address/directions, contact a club member.

Best if you park at Mini Mall (where the spaghetti establishment use to be)
 
You will get to see his new frag tank set up in the making.
 
Hope to see you there!

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[lexilynn]

I have been reading everything I can to be ready for my first coral buy. I have a Zoo i got free and just let it do it's thing.
Now I have bought my first Mushroom and wanted to know what to look for if it is getting sick or doesn't like the place I put it.

It's under 36Wand sometimes 72w of t5's and in the middle of a pristine 10 gal. ie. great water parameters.
 Help here would be great, everyone seems to know their stuff.

[jimbo]

Hi Lexilynn,

It takes a week or more for the shooms to show if they like there spot. As a rule of thumb check out the lighting of where it came from and try to match or go a little less light you can move it up later. and not to warm is my experience.


                                                                            jimbo

[Nate C.]

Welcome to the board! As Jim states, start it at the bottom of the tank and work it up from there.  If you feed with a baster, you can target feed it too...they like that...basically they are similar to bigger anemones, and will grab it and eat it. 

As for knowing if things aren't happy.  If it closes into a little ball of snot, it probably isn't happy.  IF that happens, try sticking it back under a ledge a bit so that is somewhat shaded.  If it gets better, give it a while and slowly move it toward brighter light a bit at a time.

[lexilynn]

This helps.
I lost three small mushies that melted for some reason. The rest i moved to a cut up clear plastic jar on the bottom of the tank. So far the three that are left have not done anything strange like melt but did let go of the plug and now are crawling back onto it. they seem happily flat and colorful.

[Nate C.]

Melting is usualy a sign of too much light, or some chemical paramter being out of whack, or temperature.  If you have them in the jar and they stay attached to the rock for a couple days, you are probably safe to take them out and keep them at the same level in the tank (that way you don't have to look at the jar...just the shrooms). What is the tank temp running?  What type of test kits are you using to evaluate water parameters?  What do you have for fish in the tank?  MORE details...we all want to know everything there is to know aobut your tank!    Oh, and PICTURES.  

[Ed]

Lexy,
    I hate to bombared you with questions.

#1 What is your salinity?
#2 Do you use filtered (RO or RO/DI) water?
#3 Do you mix your saltwater inside the tank?
#4 Anything copper-metal fittings in your saltwater?
#5 Butterflys? Filefish? Crabs?  Camel Shrimp?
and what Nate stated above on Temps/alk. 
I will stop there. 
 

[lexilynn]

Info is always a good thing to have when needing help.

I think i find out the cause of the melting. My six year old wanted to play in my tank blowing the rocks off and sucked up the shrooms into the baster and then spit them back out. Not wanting to get in trouble took a bit for her to tell me. So thinking that didn't help the three that I lost.

On to your answers:
#1  Salinity is stable at 1.022-1.023 ATO for evap.

#2  Just started to use RO water. had been using tap for about six months and didn't see any major algae problems. I did change when i wanted to start buying things. Slowly added the RO in with my mix about a month ago.


#3 I do mix everything i a 5 gal bucket a few days in advance so it's ready when I am for maintenance.

#4 Everything is plastic/PVC/acrylic.  

#5 I've got a true clown, bi-blenny and 6-line for fish. 1 Blue hermit, 6-8 snails cant name them. and two mini bristle stars hiding somewhere.

I use Red sea tests. My temp is 78F, Alk is in the middle at about 2.4 and ph is 8.0 and rite/rate and amon is all 0's.
Built an algae scrubber to see if it works and has been doing great at getting rid of these. It drains into my HOB filter to go though the carbon and into the tank.


thanks

[lexilynn]

The tank has been through alot the past two days. SO this is not how it looked last week.
First recovery from smoke damage from the fire that was burning in WW. Just a block from my house and filled everything including the tank with thick smoke.
Then a 12 hour power outage through the night when the clean-up crew hit a power pole backing up.
I did save everything with a bit of stress over a small kid scared of the dark and two fish tanks  to manage. Will be setting the rocks back up and detailing the tank when everything settles down. I don't want to play in it to often and stress everyone out.

[Ed]

You just answered your own question.   Your power has been off.  Smoke is not good. 

[lexilynn]

Yes Smoke is not good. Nor not having power but that all happened a week-ish after i got them. Kids in the tank will never help either.

The Mushies where leaving their rock and hiding, so I had to be doing something wrong. Plus most of what i had read said that you didn't really need to supplement feeding them but I could.

The care info that everyone gave has helped me to save my mushrooms with good placements, light tricks and behaviors to look for.  Oh and spot feeding them.

[Ed]

You answered a lot of your own questions.

You always want clean hands before going into tank.
Sometimes things in the air can polute your water- cleaners, smoke, Bleach and Amonia are big ones. 

 

[Nate C.]

Spot feeding isn't necessary, but sometimes it helps them grow faster.  Anemones do fine without feeding too, but they sure do get big and split faster when we feed ours.

I still would guess (other than the obvious with the issues you said you had), if they are walking away to go hide, they weren't ready for the light.  Try to find a darker corner and see what they do next time you add some new ones.

[Ed]

http://animal-world.com/Aquarium-Coral-Reefs/Mushroom-Coral-Information#Types of Mushrooms

 

[lexilynn]

ED, this site rocks. Thanks so much. MY LFS has been giving me small things to rehab in my tank (rocks with long gone coral, I've brought back from the grave) and they just gave me a large frag with about 20 mushrooms that all bleached themselves some months ago. It was slowly getting color back but they didn't want to mess with it anymore.

This is helping me in caring for the poor thing.  I have looked back through it tons of times.
 

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!Pics when they settle in.

[Ed]

Cool!    The best thing that happens in our club is people working together to support each other.   Keep talking and you will see other good people in here!