Not sure what this wants...

This is a new coral to my tank and has been looking pretty good for about a week. Tonight when I got home from work it's looking kinda sad...I don't know the name of it and would love help in ID'ing it and making sure I'm giving it what it wants..............Hope someone can help me...
Karen

 

xenia

 

Looks like a Xenia to me. The polyps look a little thin for Xenia though so I'm not entirely sure. Does it open and close its polyps?

 

give it some plankton.

 

If its a xenia, good luck to you. I have tried to keep xenias multiple times, with no luck. They dont like my tank. They could be pulsing in the store and as soon as I get mine home it stops, and slowly shrivels away.

Some say they like iodine, and I have heard just about every variation of flow and lighting. Some say they like high flow. Others say low. Same with lighting. I have exhausted every option with the ones I had, no luck.

But I have heard many owners of xenia say that they grow like crazy and will spread rapidly. Hopefully yours pulls through and starts to spread like other users on here have encountered.

Maybe try some target feeding with phytoplankton.

 

they should only need light (moderate to high) medium flow and maybe the supplement of iodine. be careful when dosing iodine ie make sure you are testing for it.

 

+1 on being careful with dosing iodine. Usually not the case when doing WC with a good brand of salt. Messing up with iodine can kill a tank. So beware.

Also, I am not able to keep Xenia either.....my specimens are going downhill fast now. I think I will stick with Kenya Trees.

 

+1 a good salt band will take care of alll your iodine needs for a Xenia

it dose look a little thin thou. what are your perm, and all that good stuff

 

My 1st attempt at Xenia resulted in failure. They kept shrinking until they disappeared. I tried dosing iodine to bring them back but it didn't work. I had bought them when my tank was only a month old or so.

My second attempt several months later is quite the opposite. It started growing but then started shrinking again. Not sure what happened but they reversed course and started expanding. Now I have to prune them to prevent them from taking over the tank. They pulse like crazy regardless of the flow and they do better under brighter light.

My assumption here is that like anemonees, Xenia need a mature, well lit tank to thrive.

 

Respectfully.........I do not believe any salt mix can adequately sustain Iodine in the amount needed for tanks requiring it. If someone does monthly water changes, depending also on how much they change out, the slight amount of Iodine in a few gallons of new water will not significantly raise the Iodine to bring it to proper saturation usable by the creatures requiring it and sustain this for a month until the next change. Smaller weekly changes will do even less. To further prove this, if water changes could raise Iodine levels to any significance, everyone should be testing for Iodine. Is everyone? No, hardly anyone is. Who mixes a batch of water and then tests their tank for Iodine and the batch to make sure they aren't overdosing?
To burst a myth believed by many, water changes have their place but in no way contribute to over all water quality as much as the biological filtration of the tank and sustaining the elements required by supplementation when needed.