ricordia yuma looking weird

[foobuddha]

I've never seen this happen before. I had stirred up some detritus cleaning off a rock, then went to cleaning the coralline off of the glass and saw this. It went back to normal in about 10 minutes. Any idea what it was doing?

[Jimmer]

Well, I know when I am putzing (technical term) around in the tank my shrooms have a tendency to curl up. In fact when they get really stressed they will release some white stringy looking material that gets sucked back into them when the calm down.

I'm guessing you ricordia is curled up due to stress or he got a hold of something big and might be trying to eat it.

[Mickadee]

a -its eating the food that you stirred up
b- its defending itself against what it see as a predator
my hairy mushrooms do the same thing from time to time espoically while I am messing in the tank.
mike

[foobuddha]

Thanks Guys

That's about what I had thought. But I had never seen any of my shrooms do that before - I have seen discosoma 'trumpet' before when being fed, just not so balloned up like this r. yuma. Either it got a big tasty treat, or was one ticked off shroom.

[reeftanktime]

Mine does it almost daily. I have also read that they will do this prior to splitting. I don't know if that is true yet.

[Big Dave]

Just a question here, maybe I'm wrong - who told you those were ricordia yuma? I bought mine as just 'mushroom rock'. If you just got them recently, I will tell you that they get huge!! I have a couple that are 6"+! Mine do the same thing when they catch something tasty, except they are bigger than a baseball! I will do some research and see what I can find too.

Man- imagine all this time and I may not have known I had some ricordia!!

-Big Dave

[foobuddha]

Dave,

I ID'ed these shrooms as R. Yuma with the book "The Complete Book of the Marine Aquarium" by Vincent Hargreaves.

Charactaristics he listed were smaller tentacles across the body, becoming thicker and longer at the edge and at the mouth.

It's a pretty good book, photo accompanies every ID, and it is $20 new at amazon.

[Big Dave]

I looked around some on-line coral places and found those as pacific frilly shrooms. The ricordia yuma they showed had the rounder bulbs and not the spread out bumps - like show in the pic of 'the shroom in question'. Foo, can you scan or get a digital pic of the pic in the book?

Ok, where's the big boys at so we can figure out what kind of shrooms these really are???

[foobuddha]

Dave,

I'll see about taking a pic of the pic this evening. I'll try and post it in the morning as I'm going to the theater this eve.

[foobuddha]

Here are a couple of R. Yuma pics from the web.

[foobuddha]

Actually, here's the link. Pics are taken by the author of the book.

http://www.livingreefimages.com/Page55.html

[Big Dave]

Foo- that pic is a ricordia, but the other shroom in the first pic is different. I have both in my tank. The frilly shrooms have an awesome green on the body, not the polyps, under my actinics. Mine curl up whenever they get some food, so to answer the question, it's normal!!

-Big Dave

**now who knows what the stupid shrooms are called?