Mushroom health

**smaug** · 02-05-2012, 10:35 PM

They dont benefit from any direct feedings either.Obsessively moving corals is very stressful to them as well.

**sheamurai** · 02-06-2012, 12:57 AM

haha good luck finding somewhere for them that shrimp won't bother them - you'll have to move them out of the tank!

The shrooms will be fine where ever you put them, so put them where you like. Then its best to just leave them be.

Corals are quite used to being traipsed on by shrimp, the only time it bugs me is when they steal brine or mysis that I've spot fed to something.

+1 to pretty much everything smaug said. Try not to worry about them too much - you'll have enough to do tweaking things you need to tweak, without looking for more. Somethings you will do more harm than good to by constantly fiddling with them.

**Ashurbarnipal** · 02-06-2012, 02:21 AM

Alright, I'll stop moving them for now. Though I'll prolly have to move them again when the LEDs go on, depending.

**Ashurbarnipal** · 02-10-2012, 02:42 PM

Update. Cessation from moving them seems to have helped. They're much better at night now. And here they are at day:

Of course, I'll have to move them once I put the LEDs in, cause they're way too much light for where it is now.

**Ashurbarnipal** · 02-21-2012, 11:29 PM

Well, my mushrooms have not been adapting to the LEDs well, and perhaps I underestimated how much 5 times the lighting would affect them.

This is what they looked like this morning:

So I went ahead and put a nylon mesh thing over their section of the tank:

Not sure what to do after that (apart from maybe slowly shifting the position of the clothe) or how long it'll take them to acclimate though.

**smaug** · 02-21-2012, 11:45 PM

A bit of rescaping would serve you well at this point. Now that you have all the light you will ever need you can get some shelf shaped live rocks and create shaded areas for lower light corals. Terracing the rock can give a much more versatile environment as well. You can help your shrooms by turning there rock on its side to make less light fall on them in the mean time.

**Ashurbarnipal** · 02-21-2012, 11:57 PM

Yeah, that's what I was trying to do putting it in that corner, but I guess it's just not enough shade for these lights. Which is at least a testament to their quality!

I'll try scooching them even further under and see how that does.

I did talk to the guys that made my lights, and they said shrooms can acclimate to the point of being like six inches from the surface with these things, albeit very very very slowly.

**smaug** · 02-22-2012, 01:50 AM

Why acclimate an animal to incorrect lighting when properly scaping your rocks would allow for healthy placement for any coral you could want? Your tank is in its beginning stages,now is the time to rock it right.

**Ashurbarnipal** · 02-22-2012, 01:56 AM

Oh, I didn't meant to imply I intended to move them up any further. It was just an incidental detail he brought up when I told him how the corals reacted to the light. I intend to leave the softies in the lower shaded areas :P I have plenty of room in this tank for all kinds of coral.

**Ashurbarnipal** · 02-26-2012, 11:36 PM

Ugh, these mushrooms are all over the place. For a while they were perking up when I just did several hour photoperiods with only the blues, but now they're going back down and my water is IMMACULATE. Nitrate has been 1 ppm if not less pretty consistently. Everything else is fine, calcium, dkh, ph, even tested for nitrite and ammonia to be safe.

I really thought it was these lights are just too much for it, but even the totally shaded ones are looking off. Maybe I need a more consistent lighting regime? Any thoughts, lab?