Crab Bob!

Snails acclimated. Water tests out good. Time for the next member of the Clean-Up Crew–the emerald crab!

Crab Bob is small and green mottled with ochre. In keeping with my Defective Wildlife problem, he appears to be missing a leg. (I think those regrow. If not, hopefully the other invertebrates will not laugh at him.) As there is bubble algae starting to come up from the live rock, he was a required member of the team.

The LFS (local fish store) had also just broken down their big, gorgeous pillar tank, and while I was very good, I was unable to resist a teeny tiny coral frag possessing a single blue mushroom coral, which is the kind of mushroom I wanted to put in. (The other frags were all multiple corals costing $50+, so the wee little single polyp for $10 was too good to pass up.) It also had a pack of zoos on it, which may or may not survive close contact with Mr. Mushroom, but seem happy so far.

Mushrooms supposedly reproduce quickly in the tank, so I may eventually be cursing the beasts, but they’re so damn gorgeous and I love staring at them in tanks, so I have to give it a try. They’re also very hardy, which is good, because…well…I have only the vaguest idea of what I’m doing, after all.

A stomatella snail came in on the coral frag as a hitchhiker, which I only noticed while drip-acclimating the frag. This pleases me, as they’re supposed to be a good little beastie on algae, and I was hoping to get one at some point anyway. Like the mushroom, they may eventually reproduce to the point of annoyance, but we’ll see.

ETA: The zoos have opened up, and man, this was quite a good frag for the money–there’s like forty zoos on this thing. (Otter attributes the price to the Super-D Cleavage Discount.) They’re not terribly showy zoos, being dark reddish brown with dark yellow centers, rather like tiny Gaillardia flowers, but they’re attractive in a subdued sort of way.

Leave a Reply