What a clever way to incorporate the garden eels into the reef! This build is sincerely shaping up to be one of my favorite tanks I've seen... There are few reefs like it and I envy your creativity. I'd love to see it in person some day.
I see your Xenia adjacent to green star polyps. I’ve placed both in my aquarium, on isolated rocks in the sand. Does the Xenia grow faster?
I actually had unknown fish eating one area of a mass of Xenia during a recent vacation. The automatic feeder must’ve been an adequate? Has totally grown in the past 30 days.
Yeah the xenia definitely grows faster, but the GPS is holding it at bay. That rock is so overgrown at this point I have to prune the edges so the xenia doesnt just fall off and go exploring. What you see is probably 4-6 months of grown from a typical frag.
And yup, way back in the long long ago I had a blue tang that ate xenia. Ive also had all my xenia disappear after an ATO incident and my salinity dropped a few points.