Spawning?

[undrtkr_00]

Well, I had a bit of excitement this weekend.

 

Thursday evening, I picked up a beautiful pagoda colony from Prada.

 

 

It's actually a little more green/teal than shows here, but you get the idea. It's something like 10" across and looks great in my tank. It opened right up after I put it in, and grabbed a little of the Rod's food that blew its way at feeding time.

 

Fast forward to late Friday night (a little over 24 hrs later). Shortly after the lights went to "dusk" mode, my wife looks over at the tank and says "Why is the water all milky?" I went over for a closer look, and the pagoda is blasting out little puffs every few seconds. Each puff was coming from an individual polyp, and looked almost like a little wisp of smoke blowing out. This went on for at least several minutes (though I'm not sure how long before we noticed).

 

Fortunately, I was planning on a big weekend water change, and already had a batch mixing and up to temp. So, from 1-2 AM, I did a 1/3 change and replaced the carbon. At this point it looks like everything in the tank is happy and survived just fine.

 

I am assuming this was a spawning event, but not sure. I did a little searching and did not find anything specific to pagodas. It was not a full or new moon or anything, but I thought perhaps the stress of moving, etc was enough to bring this on. Any other ideas?

[Michael7979]

I would guess it was spawning. Your description of "wisps of smoke" is what makes me think so.

[TAD]

When stuff like that happens do some of the corals feed on the stuff floating around?

[albertareef]

Wow... crazy. Spawning would have been my guess as well but I don't really know anything about how pagoda's reproduce. I wouldn't be surprised, however, if it could be induced by a stress event of some sort. I hope someone on here knows about these guys.