Peppermint Shrimp Eating Branching Hammer Coral

[gigmeyer]

I came down this morning before lights on and found my peppermint shrimp tearing away at one of the branches of my branching hammer. While the damage is not too evident, I did see pieces of phosphorescent hammer floating around where the shrimp was attacking it. Has anyone heard of this behavior before? Could it be there is a lack of food that is causing this? While all the CUC seems healthy, I haven't spotted a bristle worm, pod, flatworm, or starfish in about 6 weeks, so I was wondering if some of my original hitchikers have perished.

 

[SkiFletch]

So wait you are feeding or not?

 

[Danno]

Peppermint shrimp have atallent for attacking nuisence algae and pests. Some of the people I talk to at my LFS say that they have had problems with them picking at soft corals. Make sure you are feedind your Peppermint shrimp food weither it be nori, flakes, or frozen food. What I like to do is take a piece of nori, cut it in a square. Make small cuts in it all the wait down so it looks like confetti all connected at the center point. Take the center point and weigh it down with gravel. It is like a food plant that all that wants can have. Any uneated food 20 minutes later you can take out.

 

[gigmeyer]

I recently changed my feeding (~May 20) from mysis or brine only to alternate between flake food and mysis or brine. Generally, I feed once a day and use flakes every other day. I also have pellet food that the shrimp used to grab up, but backed off on that many weeks ago as hair algae was building up and I subsequently had a cyano outbreak. At this point, the cyano and hair algea all seem to be in check and the tank is pretty clean.

My thought now is to include some sinking pellets with the daily routine for the peppermint and skunk cleaner. These shrimp have recently started swimming to the surface to eat which is a new behavior. While entertaining, they appear to be more active and aggressive now.

Make any sense?

 

[SkiFletch]

Huh, interesting. Watch them during feeding time... Do they come out and try and remove the food that the hammer coral grabs? Or do they do their damage some other time than during the feeding frenzy.