May 23 2004:

The goby dumps a lot of sand on anything within about 6 inches of the bottom of the tank, so we've done a lot of rearranging over the past week to get the inverts out of its way. We'd consider trading in the goby if he didn't do such a great job of cleaning the sand, and eating algae, and in general being a really fun fish to watch.

We noticed these strange translucent tubes growing all over the insides of some of the rocks we moved. It's really hard to get a good picture of them. There were also spherical white things and more formless white masses.

The fire shrimp molted, leaving strange remains about the tank which look like something out of an Aliens movie . . .

and also these more colorful remains. Unlike the peppermint shrimp who vanished for 2 weeks (we suspect due to a molting) the fire shrimp was only in hiding for 2 days.

Below are the three zoanthid fragments we put in the tank previously. The pink/purple ones with green fringes we added May 14th. The placement is perhaps not that great since their color perfectly matches the coraline algae. And the ones at the bottom are hard to see, they are the ones mentioned above in the April 18 entry.

We also added this mat of star polyps -- it's hard to get the colors right, but the centers are pink or light purple.

The xenia we got (see April 18) was actually three xenia, a large "tree" (pictured there), a smaller one and a single polyp that fell off and landed on a rock, pictured in a movie on April 18. The small "tree" and the formerly single polyp (now at least 10) are pictured below. The larger of the two pictured here has started moving up the rock since we rearranged things.

Finally, on the left below is a nice picture of the clowns I got while taking the others. On the right is the the mushroom rock we got soemtime around Feb 29 which one of the clowns occasionally adopts, I just realized I didn't have any pictures of the whole thing. These mushrooms are pink , some have a green base (whatever you want to cal the non-bumpy part) which really glows under the actinic lights.