Strawberry Beefcake

Today was another big day for our aquarium. We heard from Aquatek that they were supposed to get a shipment in today around 3pm that was likely to contain Strawberry crabs! Ben was very excited to hear this as he has been wanting a pink crab since he heard about them. We were indeed able to purchase a strawberry this evening. Even though they are said to be related to the Emerald crab that we first got, this dude is much bigger than our Emerald. Both crabs are said to get to be ~2 inches. Well, our strawberry is already that big. Our little emerald is only about 1 inch. We are keeping our fingers crossed that we got a friendly crab!

While I was out running errands today, I got a call from Allie. She said, 'I think we have a dead shrimp now!' I said, well what are you seeing? She told me that there was a clear or white shell that looked just like our peppermint shrimp. I told her that it was more likely that our shrimp molted! She looked at it again and then agreed that is what happened. Allie quickly found Ben to show him the exoskeleton of our peppermint shrimp. We now have confirmation that at least one thing in our tank is growing! :)

We watched one of our corals, the finger leather, quite a bit today. It doesn't seem to be acclimating well to our system. The first couple of days, it seemed to be doing well. It sort of swelled up and then little feather-like flowers pop out all over the coral. After those first couple of days, the coral seemed to sort of shrink up. Last night, I tried moving the coral's position in the tank to get more light and water flow. I had a suggestion from one of our LFS to give it a bit more Iodine to help it recover. And finally, while at Aquatek buying our strawberry, they suggested that we actually want to move the coral back down out of the light and water flow. The coral is once again further down the rock face and a little sheltered from the light. We are keeping our fingers crossed for this one!

I now have two tanks to keep track off, the one we intended to have and our own little Alcatraz. This morning I went into check on our little murderers and counted 11 hermit crabs instead of 10 like I thought I had. I know for sure that I had pulled two dead crab bodies from the tank yesterday, so I must have started with 13 instead of 12. Clearly, one of the hermits felt bad for the miscommunication, so they killed another crab today. Now we are actually down to 10...