The E2MC2 certificate in - Mushroom Carving

[rockgarden]

With recent focus on Einstein I couldn't resist a bit of fun    .

I responded to a PM question about mushroom fragging this AM and decided that with a bit of editing and being in a jovial mood after listening to a turkey sing,

http://www.msn.americangreetings.com/view.pd?i=382219626&m=1652&rr=y&sou

it would be suitable for a public posting.

Here goes.  How to earn your Experienced Expert Mushroom Coral Carving/Copier (E2MC2) credentials.
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Mushroom coral carving/fragging:

It's like cooking really. Cut off the tops with a sharp knife, leave the stem on the rock. Place the top in a plastic container in the bottom of the tank with some bits of coral or shells or bits of substrate and preferably with a bit of netting over the container. The netting will keep the crabs out, the coral rubble will give the mushroom something to attach to and presto about three days later your mushroom willl hopefully have attached to some of the shell fragments or the rubble and you can take it out and glue the rubble bits to a piece of rock with cyanoacrylate glue - a.k.a. crazy Glue). The stem will grow back another mushroom eventually and presto you have doubled your mushroom population.

Method number two: Use fishing line or elastic band to attach the head to a piece of rock (same method as for the leather coral except that the mushrooms are very soft and slimy so I prefer the first method).

Method number three: Cut off head. Cut the head into a bunch of little pieces (like chopping onions or mushrooms for dinner). Place the bits in a container as in method # 1 or just throw the bits back into your tank. Either way, you will end up with the original mushroom stem growing back its head and you should end up with more mushrooms in total. With the scatter-in-the-tank method you just have less control over where they end up and you may have a slightly lower overall success rate. The chop-them-up method will get you lots of little mushroooms which will eventually grow to full sized mushrooms but not the fastest way but eventually you should get lots of quantity.

Believe me. Your first attempt is an experiment. If it works for you, you instantly reach EXPERIENCED EXPERT MUSHROOM CORAL CARVER/COPIER status and can send out e-mails like this one.


Enjoy your turkey.

Ron

[redbelly]

Nice post Ron! thanks!!
i didnt think of the tupaware idea before.

[Julie]

What kind of interesting mushrooms do you have in your tank Ron?


Julie

[rockgarden]

Blue, red, green stripe (two types), brown (various from smooth to fuzzy) and a very nice brown with a purple halo effect around the centre.

Most of my mushrooms came to me as one or two polyp frag trades so any mushroom reproduction so far has been just to fill my own rock spaces.  

My green ricordia has been kind enough to move around the tank and leave a trail of small ricordea behind so I have about a dozen green ricordia now from natural replication rather than from my intervention. If only my orange/pinkricordea yuma with lime green  mouth would be so kind to do the same I would be a happy camper indeed.

Ron

[Julie]

More pics please :lol:

julie

[sarahbella]

i would love to see some pics too

[rockgarden]

I haven't had any success uploading photos to the OVAS gallery site so you will have to travel to the AC site to see my reef photos (now four in total).  The latest is posted at:

http://aquariacanada.com/PhotoPost/showphoto.php/photo/2484/limit/recent

Ron

[rockgarden]

The picture doesn't do this one justice but it is my favourite.  The overall colour is brown but the halo is shadings of purple and mauve.

Ron

[Julie]

Neat - here's the ones I got.
Maybe eventually we could trade some.

Julie