Return to the Reef!

In all the excitement of launching the second Shinobi Mystery, BLADE OF THE SAMURAI, I may have forgotten a couple of Tuesday Reefs… I’ve still been taking pictures, however, so fortunately there’s something to share today. Here’s a photo-status-update of the reef! Ghillie the seahorse likes to sit under the new sun coral – to reference a favorite book from my childhood, he’s a regular Ferdinand: My abalone, Oscar, spends his days consuming algae. Unfortunately, he’s nearsighted, and can’t always tell the difference between an algae-covered rock and a seahorse:   When he does find his way to the algae, however,

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Ripley … Believe it or Not!

Last week I brought home another porcelain crab for my little reef. Although larger than the other two, the new addition looks almost identical to the existing porcelain crabs, Face and Hugger. I’d originally named her “Hold” but after discovering that the new crab was both female and gravid (egg bearing, aka “pregnant”) my son persuaded me that she needed a name more in line with the “Alien” theme of the other two. We’ve named her Ripley. After completing her acclimatization hold, I released Ripley into the tank. She swam immediately into a large cluster of blue-green palythoas, where she

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Colonial Corals on the Move

Most corals live in colonies. In some species, the individual animals conjoin themselves in a single mass: While others live as collections of separate polyps joined at the bases. Palythoas (like the coral pictured above) and zoanthid species are among the types that live as separate, conjoined polyps. The colonies normally spread by forming new polyps around the outside edges of the existing colony mass. The colony gets larger and wider over time, until the polyps form a bushy-looking cluster like the brown and teal ones in the photo. But not always. Like many other coral species, a palythoa polyp

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