xenia shrinkage

[civickid]

i put the xenia in my mimi reef and when i did it started to shrink. sometimes a couple of the arms will expand. I was just wondering if this was normal until it gets acclimated to the tank or if there is something wrong

 

[matti070]

put him in a quarantine tank for now, in case he has a contaigous disease, then ask in the disease and treatment forum if its a disease or just natural. i would tell you what it was if i knew.
Hope it helps,
Matt

 

[bang guy]

Xenia is extra sensitive to water changes. It can handle quite a diversity of water conditions, but it's very sensitive to change. It will take a week or so to acclimate to your tank.

 

[nm reef]

I agree...even in a well established system they tend to respond poorly to fluctuations in water chemistry...moving to a new system could cause them to close and look poorly for a few days. Lots of people swear they can detect problems in their reefs just by watching for changes in the behavior of xenia.

 

[black99l]

my xenias did the same thing. i move them out of a 150 gal reef to a 10 gal reef. Then one day they just started to open up (probably after a couple of weeks). now they are starting to spead and grow new arms all over the place.

 

[skierguy]

Civickid thank you for starting this thread. I picked one up from my LFS at the begining of last week. I was dissappointed because it shrunk down to ¼ the size and released a cloud into the water column. I did not do the best job of acclimating it. (Very poor to be quite honest). I thought it was my tank but the water tested fine. How much can they come back from? Does mine still have a chance?

 

[naturelover]

IME xenia is very hard to say it will thrive on certain conditions. I bought one small frag almost 5 months ago and now I am trading it @ LFS for other corals. I have it under high flow, high light, low flow, low light and even in caves (no lights). Usually the one right under MH on top shrinks when MH goes off (slight PH drop) and back to normal within 15 min. Here is a pic where it is on high light with high flow.

 

[civickid]

my xenia is starting to get bigger now well the arms are The little finger things are still closed so i hope it continues to open up .