I'm not sure if anyone is still reading this thread
but I figure it's time for an update. No additions to report this time. The yellow watchman goby wore a hole in his side and has been in the hospital tank for 2.5 weeks now. I've been running a separate
thread about him, but the short version is that he's doing much better. I expect he'll be at least another two weeks before he gets to rejoin the general population.
Before photo
Current status
I'm still in awe that he's survived this wound.
The purple anthias that I added four weeks ago are still pretty shy. Out of the three of them, one is out almost all the time, the second is out often, but disapears whenever you approach the tank, and the third only seems to come out for a couple hours when the lights turn on, and vanishes whenever anything in the room moves. They all seems to disapear around 6pm like clockwork (the lights go out at 10pm).
The downside to all of this (other than the obvious) is that only the one seems to eat regularly, though the second guy seems to get food at least every other day. I'm worried about the shyest one who never seems to get fed unless I sneak a spoon of cyclopeze into the back canopy opening from around the corner. This only works on weekends, when I'm home to do it when anthias #3 is out shortly after my lights turn on around 2pm. My wife calls this operation "stealth feeding".
I'm also battling a cyano outbreak
This started shortly after removing a sponge from my sump to use as cycled filtration in my hospital tank. I'm not sure if it's a result of removing this little bit of filtration from the DT, or a result of adding the three antias at once and overfeeding a bit to try to coax them to eat. I'm putting my money on option 2 though. Today I'm going to start a 3 day blackout of the tank and see if that does anything. If that doesn't work, I guess I may resort to red slime remover, though I'm not excited at that idea...
I also got a visual on the remaining mantis in my tank last week! He's getting big and must be 4 inches long, and black/dark in colour. He wasn't green like the mantis in my sump. I was kind of hoping that the clicking in the tank was just one of the giant hitch hiker crabs that live in the tank, but what I saw last week was definatly a mantis. That brings my count of these guys to 3 (1 removed, 1 relocated to sump, 1 in DT). He doesn't seem to be hurting much though, so I think I'll just leave this one be.
Thanks for looking.