got ethical husbandry?

Lucious pink former glory

I'm not going to post a pic of the original colony, seeing that amount of pinkness just saddens me that its not like that today. Well apparently my nice cap while I had it in my prop tank experienced a MAJOR loss of alk (something like 3-4 dKh) or maybe it was always that low since I did 25% waterchanges almost weekly (haven't used Instant ocean since though!)

Well it lookd pretty gone, infact I tossed it in the new tank I setup and it looked pretty gone, sand kept blowing on it, so I blew the sand off and tossed it outside in my porch tank, there it only got about 4-6 hours of really bright light (still unsure of the exact levels, but Milkwakee has a nifty meter for about $80 that might become mine one day), and it's filtered light through fiberglass. Now an interesting thing came about, I started seeing flesh coming back! Well I left it some more and more flesh came back, so I decided to frag off some pieces that are literally the size of finger nail clippings (yeah they're small), I did this mostly because in addition to the growth, now algae can grow on the dead skeleton... so hopefully I can toss my eggs in a couple other baskets to try and save what is left.

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Here's the mother colony, if you can call it that. At the time of this picture there is no direct light on the porch so it looks brownish, but there's still a good amount of ambient light so I don't feel the need to suppliment my test tank (natural light only). As you can see there is a buttload of dead tissue, algae growth in various forms (green, stringy, red bubble). The more I think of it I think it might be more useful to get a dremel and carefully cut around the good flesh and stop trying to scrape algae off, and just glue the remaining pieces to chunks o rock.

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Here's a couple pieces I stuck in, they are literally so small it's incredibly hard to get a shot that is not either oversaturated or overly blurry, I've decided to give up on trying too much until it grows. This side of the tank has 4 T5s so its one form of light, it looks much crisper over here.
 
Update: I brought the cap in from the outside light, while yes it was growing great, the algae growing on it was growing even better (bleh!) so having stuck it in my main tank (where my foxface more than happily devoured any algae on it) it REALLY has colored up. You can see the super pink outer rim where it's growing and what seems to be bright ruby red grapefruit color on the inside parts... I thought about fragging this whole thing up to save the parts that are growing but after seeing this I have a feeling the new stuff will grow right over the old flesh.

Sorry for the crappy picture it's the only decent one I could get since this is at the top of the tank.

Light is 250w 12000K Reeflux bulb.
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