Well I have successfully impressed my dad with my tanks; good stuff. Basically nobody gets to see that room in person aside from my husband so it's always fun to have a chance to show it off to someone. Pictures just can't really capture being able to reach in and interact with things in real time.
One piece of sad news I forgot in the last post I made: the thorny oyster is no more. But, before anyone says it, no - it was pretty obviously not starvation if my observations of other Bivalves and other Mollusks in general are anything to go by. Starving Bivalves I have seen go out pretty fast; they exhibit exaggerated feeding responses and then just punk out one night or over a few days at most. I have also had encrusting Bivalves successfully breed in this tank and make growing babies (water contamination actually spread them to other tanks too but they haven't fared well in most except this one), so basically I know there is not a shortage of filter food in there. More importantly though, in all other Mollusks I have seen, deaths in old individuals (where the oldness is obvious and food is abundant) go along with a gradual changes in things like reaction speed. When they're on the way out, you poke at them and a while later they respond as if you'd only just done it. For example, this is a big cue with animals like sea hares that the end is approaching regardless of how much eating they do. The delay increases slowly over anywhere from a couple of weeks to a couple of months depending on the individual and species. I had unfortunately been seeing this in the oyster recently. Despite being in the process of starting a new "thorn" and shell layer, it had gotten to the point where I'd tap it and it would respond as much as 2 seconds late, even though it would respond with as much force as ever. I wasn't too surprised by this, since if the shell-based aging methods for these oysters are anywhere remotely near correct then this was not a young oyster and it was well within the quoted maximum size range. This would be the case even if the year estimates are off but relative age guesses from youngster to elderly are reasonable. I actually do suspect that the year estimates are off, since as with many animals the age guesses come from "annual" growth rings. But, those rings are not always deposited annually when you put an animal in a tank and watch for a long enough time. It's painfully obvious with many snails I have kept, both freshwater and saltwater, even when I've allowed the tanks to experience seasonal temperature changes. Don't get me wrong as I'm not saying that rings are never annaul, but it is a poorly studied assumption for a lot of animals. For example, I was also reading about some relatives of Spondylus (thorny oysters) that are similarly-sized but only live 4-5 years, much like what I've read about Lima.
Anyway, enough textwall. More picwall.
Check out the polyp that decided to have two mouths (both of which feed) but not actually split.
This one is not great but I'm putting it up because it shows the polyp division in the candycane, which is pretty cool.
Id like to read up on that zooplex and see if it would be worth getting. I want my zoas to grow =O
I've had almost zero luck getting zoas and paly polyps to show an interest in zooplex. Of the species I've had that show distinct eating tendencies, they will take zooplex if not fed for a while but don't seem all that thrilled with it. Smoothie-fied clam/oyster bits and eggs, on the other hand, are a very different story. But, some zoas won't even show interest in that. There are some that are really just not interested in food.
They do get rather large for a CUC hermit. I've seen HUGE ones at the LFS.
These were juvis just under 1".
I just have to remember to make sure I feed the hermits before I feed the fungia.
Oh definitely - it's always a good idea to do to minimize the chance of disaster. Unfortunately, I don't think it would have prevented what I saw though. There were plenty of other food options around the tank, and I hadn't even fed the polyps that day. The hermits just suddenly seemed to have decided that the polyp tissue tasted good. The fleshy bits that were left all over were all cleaned up pretty fast, and not by me. I had a similar issue with my Dardanus hermits and big orange Tunicates (pics of which I think are somewhere back a ways in this thread) - all was peaceful until one hermit got an accidental taste of a recently-deceased individual, and then the others were decimated in short order. It could be that suns have something repulsive that would normally stop them from being eaten (slime maybe?) and the hermits by accident discovered that they are edible regardless of that.
My surviving polyps are looking a bit fatter now though. They're getting access to a 2x daily mix of basically every filter feeder product at nearby LFS. My filter-feeder slurry now consists of: microvert, phytomax, chromamax, rotifeast, coral smoothie, and oyster delight. The mix covers everybody from my encrusting clams to the tube worms and LPS. Zoomax goes in afterwards but mainly ends up feeding the LPS and thorny brittles (they filter feed! Pretty strange to watch).
I bought three others a while back and they're fine."
It's a rescue from another of my tanks. It was in that other tank for ages doing just fine, both eating a lot of food on its own and getting target feedings, and then got savaged out of the blue one day by my Calcinus elegans (electric blue) hermits. I walked in and they were up on the polyps digging their claws in repeatedly. Lots of little orange bits everywhere. 
Those were well-fed hermits as far as I can tell (and I bother over my hermits in ways most people reserve for things like dogs and cats), so it really was a shock to see...but it won't be the first time a Calcinus species has had a surprise in store for me, with that big claw and all. Some of the polyps got beaten up so badly that they've healed as multiple polyps in the same tube. Probably the most annoying part of it is that the surviving polyps won't accept target feeding now; part of it is probably them just needing to recover and also that they've shrunk, making it really difficult to even try. So, I have been going a bit heavier on the coarse filter feeder food. It has been working a bit; there were a couple of tubes that I thought had died out completely and I see orange peeking back out of them now.
