Corals From A Meth Lab

With my water parameters in stable condition these past few weeks, I've finally put in some corals after a month of staring at rocks. Since the corals at my favorite LFS (Atlantis) are somewhat pricey I went on an adventure to find a bargain. The best deals are found online but this being my first experience buying corals and all, I wanted to see them before purchasing. And I didn't want to have to sit and worry if they're going to make it okay through shipping.

I heard about this place called Tropical Expressions (for all you locals, it's at Rainbow and Oakey behind Lee's Liquor) which apparently has good prices on livestock though I was warned about the strange woman that runs the shop. So I went with a friend to investigate and sure enough the place looked like a meth lab (that's what my friend described it as); not immaculate at all like Atlantis and there were strange tanks with pipes and beakers all over the place. Jackie, the owner, introduced herself and was pretty cooky and strange, like she hadn't had any sleep in days. But nice nonetheless. The best part was the prices on her livestock: I walked away with a purple mushroom coral and some blue zoanthids for $46.33. Not bad considering a regular mushroom coral at Atlantis would run you a good $80 while a colony of zoanthids can get close to $100. I also gnored the fact that her tanks were dirty and murky.

I ran home and acclimated the corals for an hour. I displaced some of the water from my tank to accomodate the weight of the rocks and floated them in.

I poured a small cup of water from my tank into the bags every ten minutes after throwing out a cup of water from the bags.

An hour into acclimatization I carefully placed them into the tank. I decided to place the rock with the purple mushrooms on the sand bed in the middle of my tank. The rock with the blue zoanthids I placed almost vertically on the left. At this point I'm realizing that I probably have too much live rock as I struggle to place my first two corals.

The blue zoanthids hid their polyps for the first two hours but eventually opened up. The purple mushrooms all opened up nicely except for the big one which is still pretty shriveled up from the transfer.

I found some pretty interesting hitchhikers on the coral rocks: bristle stars, some mystery anemones and something that looks like a feather duster but might very well be a coral polyp of some sort. At this point, it's too small to tell.

All in all the transfer seemed to have gone smoothly though I'm a little worried about the large purple mushroom polyp that's still pretty shriveled up. I'll just have to pay close attention to it over the next few days.