I have someting chewing on the ends of my corals, stony corals. I noticed today my purple acro was trimmed back, and a good piece of chalice was eaten as well. im thinking its my long spine urchen. i do have a coral beauty, but hard corals, i dont know. Im wandering if anyone else has had this problem. Thanks Greg
more bad news bought a new diamond golby this weekend. i realy liked this guy, kids did too. he thought he had wings. three day old fish. this a bad week for the shofner reef.
I have had many gobies and they all like to do a little skydiving every once and a while. Sorry for your loss.
sad to hear about the goby Coral beauties have been known to be coral nippers in reef tanks - be my guess, I would not think it was the long spine urchin, but I could be wrong.
Coral beauties and most all angels well go around nipping at coral polyps on sps, but they do not normally eat the corals ends or chew on chalices. If you have angels in the tank, the polyps just won't extend during the day and some people don't like that, even though that is what happens in the wild. I have had several coral beauties over the years and have one now and they just peck at everything, but do no real damage, I also have a flame and he does the samething, it is just the nature of most all angels. The corals extend at night after the lights go out and the fish go in the reef. I would look elsewhere. Make sure and keep them fed also, as anything that is hungry well go looking for food, feed a couple times a day.
Could be a gorilla crab that came in with the live rock, you would be amazed at how long they can remain out of sight in a tank. Many yrs ago I had a 55 gallon that had nothing added for more than a yr and one nite I spotted a huge crab shredding my yellow polyps. It only took three hrs of tear down to find his butt, just his body not counting legs and claws was larger than a silver dollar and in all that time I never spotted him. I agree with fishermann on the dwarf angels and their nipping the only coral I have had that they really damaged was xenia.
I would point my finger at the long spine urchin. My previous urchin I had for several years suddenly developed a taste for my blastos in my 75 gal, then it figured out that those coral skeletons were pretty tasty! I moved it to the refugium where it could graze on coraline algae and cheatomorpha to its hearts desire. It made me very sad to move my huge long spine out of the display, but it was doing too much damage for my reef to keep up and repair its self.
Diadema setosum - Long-spined Sea Urchin - should be a herbivore, but I have read if he is starving he could become carnivorous.
If it is the urchin, you should be able to see small scrapes on the coral where it's mouth scrapes across the skeleton (may need a magnifying glass). If they are not there I would consider as greentrees suggested a gorilla crab or maybe a large hermit.
no more damage to date. im watching closely. hard corals take too long to grow for this. we will see how it goes. Thanks for all coments Greg
