Big Habeeb wrote on Mon, 26 Nov 2007:
I watched him 'clean' the clownfish a few nights in a row, and sure as
spit, bye bye cottony growth.

Glad your problem is resolved.

Clownfish appears to be happy and healthy again, apart from forming a
relationship with an algae bloom (he seems to think its an anemone)
With that in mind, anybody have a suggestion for a coral that might
make him happy? I've heard of clowns forming relationships with
hammer corals and the like...

Depends on the species of clown, and the type of host.

The best combination is of course to get a native host anemone that is
appropriate to your clown species.

After that, you can sometimes use sea anemones that aren't hosts in the wild,
but sometimes become hosts in captivity.

Depending on the clown, though, many will use lots of different corals as
hosts, if they can't find the anemone they want. Basically, large-polyped
soft-flesh stinging corals are "almost" anemones. I've heard of clowns
sometimes adopting large mushroom corals.

For myself, I've had ocellaris clowns that have hosted in frogspawn corals,
and in hammer corals (which are closely related coral species). It's sometimes
taken a month or two for them to adapt to a new host.

For that matter, my clowns previously made a small depression in the sand and
slept together in a little pile on the sand for awhile. And for awhile they
slept in a large plate coral (montipora capricornis), which isn't soft or
stingy at all:
http://reef.geddis.org/cgi/show-phot...nfish/dsc01534

But the good news is that it doesn't really matter. Clowns will do just fine
in a bare tank with no other corals at all.

-- Don
__________________________________________________ _____________________________
Don Geddis http://reef.geddis.org/
It takes a big man to cry, but it takes a bigger man to laugh at that man.
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey