kien's 150g Room Divider Mixed Reef & Stuff

[Coleus]

Originally Posted by Argentiner

Wow, you can take amazing pics. Corals and blenny look great.

Yeah you got to see his camera equipment :-) Great photos always

[mseepman]

Your tank is amazing and a definite inspiration to my upcoming build. I have a question for you though. I saw on your videos that you have some mushrooms on one rock. How do you keep them from taking over your whole tank? I had one mushroom when I started 3 years ago, now I have 200 and they are busy killing everything they can, and that's after me harvesting them every month.

[kien]

Originally Posted by mseepman

Your tank is amazing and a definite inspiration to my upcoming build. I have a question for you though. I saw on your videos that you have some mushrooms on one rock. How do you keep them from taking over your whole tank? I had one mushroom when I started 3 years ago, now I have 200 and they are busy killing everything they can, and that's after me harvesting them every month.

Thanks! Looking forward to your peninsula build! I think it must be the species of mushrooms. In a previous tank I had the same problem, mushrooms grew like weeds and nearly took over. Kinda put me off mushrooms for a while. Then I got back into mushrooms in my last 90gallon tank and started with that rock of blue mushrooms that you see in those pics. It has not grown much beyond its rock. If I do see it heading to other rocks I prune it, but it does not seem to do that that quickly. Certainly not plague like that I've experienced before. I also have a couple of patches of two different varieties of red mushrooms which grow/spread even slower. Very very slow. And then there's a rock of rhodactis and a couple of rocks of ricordias which are also painfully slow. So I guess in the end I am just lucky, I don't know.

Sorry that I can't offer much more of an explanation other than that. If I had to make a more educated somewhat scientific guess, I would maybe chalk it up to low nutrients ? My SPS seem to do really well so maybe they are starved ? I do love my mushrooms but ya.. if they ever started to take over again like last time I'd be put off and try to get rid of them.

[mseepman]

So what did you do when you had the plague? I would like to use my current rock in the new tank but there are so many mushrooms that I couldn't imagine taking that over.

[kien]

Originally Posted by mseepman

So what did you do when you had the plague? I would like to use my current rock in the new tank but there are so many mushrooms that I couldn't imagine taking that over.

Took the infested rocks out, scraped them off the rocks with a razor, put rocks back in. Any babies that tried to come back were immediately scraped clean off the rock. Was a royal pain but it worked.

Oh, they tended to shrivel when out of the water so i scraped them while submerged in a rubbermaid tub. I think i used a metal scouring pad as well to scrub the leftover bits.