Xenia elongata

"but any Xenia elongata we've tried
to keep has withered away."

Well what are your tank specs? Water peram., size , lighting, placement and current?

On Sun, 27 Nov 2005 04:27:03 GMT, wrote:

"but any Xenia elongata we've tried
to keep has withered away."

Well what are your tank specs? Water peram., size , lighting, placement and current?

We have a 120 gal tank with PCs and actinics; I think the other reefer
here (who's the mechanically inclined one) says our flow-through rate
is somewhere in the vicinity of 800 gph -?- There's a pond pump down
there in the sump, I think. We don't have a refugium. The substrate is
commercial crushed coral, about 2-3 inches deep. There's an old plenum
down in there somewhere, but it isn't connected to anything that would
move water through it. I don't know how much in weight we've got in
live rock ... it's a moderate amount, no towering reef wall. It's
probably half the height of the tank, with several inches (ie, 2-3) on
all sides adjacent to walls, and fair amounts of open space in it.

We use the Tropic Marin Pro/Reef (?) formula salt mix, and supplement
with iodine, Mg, and other sundry trace minerals twice a week. We
start off with RO from our own system.

Nitrate hangs around 20ish. No measurable phosphates, negligible
ammonia. The temp stays between 78 and 80, and the SG (via hydrometer
or refractometer) is pretty stable around 1.024-1.026. The Ca in this
tank is in the 500 range, although the pH keeps creeping down. We add
buffer every week when we do maintenance on the tank, and while it
starts around 8.0, it soon dips down into the 7.8s, which I don't
like.

We've got too durn many fish, I know. Mostly damsels, though. There's
11 of them. Then there's 3 purple firefish, a couple clarkii clowns, a
fairy wrasse, a cleaner shrimp, 6 Peppermints (although they're new,
and it looks like maybe they're not going to survive the Cleaner
shrimp - he hates them), and miscellaneous snails and hermits. Most of
our corals are things like the Xenia, some Zoos, a couple tree corals,
a flowerpot (who's lately unhappy and doesn't come out), a hammer, a
frogspawn, and a torch, and several patches of mushrooms. Some
Caulerpa prolifera lurking around the edges too. There's a couple Xmas
tree rocks, who also have looked better. They seem to like the renewal
of the iodine supplement, though.

I try to be careful with feeding, but they're doing everything but
sending up flares, always hungry. I feed them maybe every day, and
certainly every other day with a variety of flake, granular,
planktonic, and frozen foods. Sometimes they get a piece of raw shrimp
or Nori. Other aquarium-keepers say feed less. The references say feed
more. I'm trying to strike something in the middle, and the feed-ees
are petitioning for more all the time.

I'm not sure what else you need to know. If I missed a specific, ask.
~v~

=^..^=
.... the problem with people these days is that
they've forgotten we're really just animals.