saltwater newbie attempting a 55 gallon reef

  • We are currently upgrading MFK. thanks! -neo
My soft corals are fine 99% of the time, its just the montis that seem to have lost some color. I'm thinking I might upgrade my lights to metal halides, or at least a T5 with higher wattage (maybe 6 tubes instead of just 4) when I find a good deal on a new fixture.

So the zoa eating nudibranches are back :irked: I guess the ones I found before had a chance to lay some eggs in my zoas. When I noticed these new nudibranches I quickly pulled out that colony of zoas and gave them a 25 minute dip in a lugols iodine solution mixture. I just followed the directions on the bottle (40 drops per 1 gallon of tank water) but I'm a little concerned with something I noticed...

While the colony of zoas was soaking I took the opportunity to "clean" the polyps, scraping off about 5 nudis and anything that could have possibly been eggs. The thing that concerned me is that the nudis that I scraped off didn't die. They just crawled around in the iodine mixture. I thought the purpose of the dip was to kill them....what gives?? Did I not add enough Lugols to the water??

I'm hoping I was able to scrape all the nudibranches and eggs off and the lugols mix did its job but I am def going to keep my eye on those zoas for a while.

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this is such a long stream of replies for such a simple question...
 
I can recommend bluezoo to you. Good info. Great service, cheap shipping if you want to buy things, but I go to my lfs.
 
This is a nice and helpful thread to help wary new guys in the business of saltwater.
 
best way to ride the zoanthid nudibranches is remove them all from the main tank as there are ton's of eggs that you don't know about yet put the zoo's in QT for a month and let the display nudi die off and kill and dip the one's you may find in QT. you should be glad its not zoapox

mr.reef24
 
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