got our first polyp

I find that button polyps don't need direct feeing as they will catch whatever you feed your fish

 

Unless your cleanup crew includes a camelback shrimp,you shouldn't have to worry about critters eating your polyps. As for crabs, some are coral eaters so if you can trap them and confine them to your sump, you should have no worries As for aiptasia, just throw about 5 peppy shrimp to your system and at least one will eat the offending anemone.

 

Not to mention that stuff that comes out of the back end of fish, shrimp, etc - that is floating around in water column


Also that good healthy stuff you spend lots of time scraping off your glass.

 

part of my job in the AF is to service aircraft latrines, I did that the first 4 years of my career so not much bothers me now LOL.

hmm, crabs in the sump. sounds like a plan, I just need to build one. The capula algae is what will be hard to find here due to language barrier, and I doubt the stuff will survive a possible 2 week shipment to japan... should be fun to figure out.. any suggestions on what to use?

I still have a couple mantis shrimp I need to catch!

when I turned on one side of the T5's just about every one of the polyps came out to a full bloom!
I am just thrilled they survived.

I like those purple polyps. will different colonies of button polyps fight each other if they are different colors in the same area?

 

Mantis shrimp are harmless unless you don't mind losing a snail or crab from time to time

 

they can eat the crabs all they want, the snails I dont care either, just means I need to swim out to a particular island and pick up a bunch more at low tide

the click click of the mantis shrimp gets old but they look interesting.

 

I keep a 3" mantis as a pet in a nano tank so I'm more than biased I love those critters

All that being said,are you sure that you have a mantis and not a pistol shrimp?

 

positive

 

my picture fu sucks ass.. my auto focus camera wont focus up close to small objects

 

update: got both t5s and one MH running.. the MH on the other side of the tank

all polyps are out, I have 9 orange/red (I'm colorblind) and one green!
a snail touched a couple on accident... they retracted then came back out fast.

I am happy! now to get rid of all this stupid green algae!