for the ricordea lovers out there,heres a portion of my rics,i have them everywhere...i have a little bit of info about this...i got these ricordeas in a trade about 4-5 months ago,when i first got it it was all just greens and blues and teals,they were also tiny...so overtime some changed colors...i found out they like a lot of light,,,some morphed into purple color,goldish yellows,oranges and some went rainbows....also some will split and float around if they get shaded....and all of them got huge...
i did encounter a pest on these ricordeas....at one time it got me frustrated...a couple of weeks after getting them,btw they were wild harvested in florida,the guy i traded collects them....i never knew that they can have pests....so after a few weeks of having them i noticed some are shrinking then it will start having holes in the middle and then melts,,,i do not have any idea what was going on so i was thinking maybe its getting too much light or something is wrong with my water....i didnt think of dipping it...i had 1 bright gold ricordea in the frag rack and it so happen im inspecting some frags,,,i notice theres tiny dots on the plug where the ricordea is and the dots are gold color same color as the ricordea and its moving!...right there i knew,these tiny dots are like bugs and i knew they are eating the rics...after finding it out,,i started dipping all the suspecting ricordeas,making sure to blow them off good....i have all my ricordeas in the sandbed so i moved everything and glued everything in the rockwork...i dipped all suspecting rics and mounted everything in rocks not touching the sandbed....after dipping and dipping i have not seen signs of shrinking and melting,,,i did lost about 15 rics after before the problem got solved....
if u see your rics acting weird like shrinking and then having holes in the mouth and getting ripped do not think that it is splitting..inspect it for tiny dot like round bugs....its very tiny like size of copepods.
i am happy that i won that battle...it was very frustrating but now my rics are growing fast,it seems that the bugs are gone cause i have rics on the sand bed for quite a while now and theres no signs of anything..
some more shrooms
candlelight mushroom...when i got this it was very tiny..half dime size...this is 5 months of growth...
game over mushroom/tie dye...it already have some reds coming in...a mature adult one suppose to have orange reds greens and purples...some people that owns one said that it takes years for all colors to show...its the brightest in my tank
heres an ugly picture..