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  #1  
Old 01/04/2008, 02:17 AM
Sk8r Sk8r is offline
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don't forget to test alkalinity

One of the most overlooked things when you take to 'shroom culture is testing beyond just nitrates and ammonia.

Shrooms are pretty tolerant of nitrates. They don't mind water that a lot of corals don't tolerate.

What really sets them off:
1. ph out of whack. Should/be 7.9 to 8.3. A meter is the best way to read that.
2. alkalinity out of whack. S/b 8.3-9.3.
3. salinity out of whack. I keep it at 1.025, which gives me .001 leeway in either direction. One of the best investments you can make is an autotopoff float switch and a bucket of ro/di. This means instead of your having to add a lot of water at once to keep your salinity 'on', this dandy little switch turns on a pump to add a tablespoon of water---as needed. Corals of every sort like stability, and if you're ALL soft tissue, like a shroom, salinity changes 'hurt'...because your tissues are getting either pickled or flushed with too-fresh water. Make those changes as small as possible and your shrooms will be happier...and an autotopoff also lets you go away for days and know your tank will be perfectly balanced when you get back.
4. trace elements---do your weekly 10% water changes faithfully and despite the fact that shrooms don't mind particulates or slightly 'dirty' water---your shrooms will be happy with the water change. Why? Your salt mix contains much, much more than just salt. It contains all the trace elements [tiny, tiny fractions of elements like selenium and thorium and so on] that your shrooms 'eat up' during the week. It also, and incidentally, keeps your calcium, alkalinity, and magnesium in balance: you don't have to fuss with the Great Triad as much with shrooms as you do in stony corals, but let me just reveal a secret of the coral universe here: if these three aren't in balance you can dose alkalinity buffer or calcium until the cows come home and it will do no good. That salt mix has these three in good balance, and if you do your water changes on schedule, you will not have the problem of making them balance.
Should you discover you CAN"T make them balance, I [or any stony coral reefer] will be happy to tell you how, but usually, with shrooms, the salt mix is enough. [And just in case you intellectually wonder, it's this: the magnesium needs to test 3x where you want the calcium to read---so if you have 420 calcium, you want the mg to be around 1300; and if you have 420 calcium, 9.3 alkalinity is a great reading: it can be higher; it can be as low as 8.3. If you have those readings, they will not be shaken out of stability until corals eat enough of one of them.] But that's magically what your salt mix takes care of---mushrooms are modest consumers, so you mostly don't have to test those, so long as you keep those water changes going.

Hope that helps.
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  #2  
Old 01/04/2008, 10:38 AM
Lance M. Lance M. is offline
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Great info. You should make it a sticky.
  #3  
Old 01/04/2008, 11:01 AM
stubble88 stubble88 is offline
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What time of day should one test for each of these things?
Would one get different readings at different times of the day?

thanks
  #4  
Old 01/04/2008, 01:57 PM
Emc2 Emc2 is offline
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Thanks for the information. This might be why my yuma is unhappy. I have been topping off once or twice a day. I don't have an automatic top off system.

Do marine algae and corals have the same respiration/photosynthesis patterns as FW aquatic plants? If so, then the ph would be lower in the morning as the algae and corals produce co2 through respiration and higher in the evening as the algae consumes co2 through photosynthesis. It might be worth testing for a while to get a baseline as to how drastic that swing is.
  #5  
Old 01/04/2008, 02:16 PM
Sk8r Sk8r is offline
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You will get different readings on ph at various times of day. The rest will be steadier, and that natural fluctuation is harmless unless you ride near the border and it dips or rises extremely.
If you have ghosty problems, and have not done a several-times-a-day ph test, you might look at where you fall.

Re respiration: that's an interesting question, since these corals 'eat' light by this process: their zooxanthellae [big word for little plants] algae [which they have inside their flesh] suck up sunlight and nutrients and generate food the mushroom uses to spread out or reproduce. It could be cyclical. I don't think I've ever heard. But if you've ever seen a shroom ooze brown stuff, that's a OMG-TOO-MUCH light reaction, usually, as it rids itself of its internal algae to try to balance out. It then gets a suntan [browns] to try to minimize burning. So yes, a lot goes on with the aspect of corals that is 'plant'. I have never been convinced one way or another, but I have always found shrooms and the like don't mind a squirt of phytofeast or DT's phytoplankton. Certainly it helps support microorganisms like pods, which corals do eat. [Any coral will eat most anything it can suck in, and shroom mouths, while operating a bit like a strainer, are quite large, so I'm sure they eat pods when they can get them.]

I used to raise quite a lot of buttons and shrooms, and I'd still have them, but they don't always get along with my stonies, and I REALLY had a bloom of them in my last tank...they completely covered one rock and were headed for the rest,one even growing on the downflow wall. [Discosomas, you can figure!]

But they were thriving on the 1. good water 2. phytoplankton doses, whether primarily or secondarily [via eating things that grew because of it] 3. decent flow. and me having a decent skimmer, they got oxygenated, which probably helped a lot, too.

For anybody that wants to play with a theory of mine, I think one thing they REALLY liked was the Sea Swirl...it takes a straight-line flow and acts like your lawn sprinkler: it sits on the edge of your tank, you route your hose through it, and its nozzle swings lazily back and forth. This results in a lot of things getting stirred up, both detritus [but not in a bad way, and shrooms like a little] and just the edges of the shrooms ruffling up a bit in a continually random way. Anybody else have one of those? You sometimes see them for sale second-hand in the Used Equipment forum. Just guesswork.

I think with shrooms as with any coral changes should be slow, the water as consistently sealike as possible, though gentle flow is probably a good thing.

Note: have you ever noticed that the structure of a mushroom and that of a zoa, of an anemone, of a large polyp stony, and even of an acropora stony---are all identical? You have a mouth, a disk, and tentacles however stubby or extravagantly long that sweep food to the mouth. The mouth widens and it sucks hard if there's food in the water, the tentacles move it in; it excretes by the same aperture. The only difference is that shrooms and nems can 'walk'; buttons can only grow to expand, but all share a common tissue, so all get the food from one lucky polyp; the hard stonies have one new ability---excreting calcium into a skeleton, via pores in their base---which doesn't let them move, though they can build their tower taller and taller and branch it sideways: they again share a common tissue, and what one polyp gets is shared by all.

A lot of the earth's history starts with shrooms.

HTH.
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Sk8r

"Make haste slowly." ---Augustus.

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Last edited by Sk8r; 01/04/2008 at 02:26 PM.
  #6  
Old 01/07/2008, 01:03 PM
Quatro Quatro is offline
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Great post! All relevant issues, but relating them to corallimorpharians and specifically ricordeas is very helpful =)
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