What is it ?

[mhender]

Hello All, My wife brought this rock home. What is the blue part?

/mh

[dragonladylea]

Blue sponge

[Reefland]

Looks like a sponge to me too. Sponges are best not bought for the aquarium and little to nothing is known about their actual requirements. However, good quality liverock will usually result in a few that will do fine with no special care needed.

[mhender]

Cool,

It only cost a few bucks and it has nice color. One problem is that it wasn't fully sunmerged in water when she brought it home. (LFS kids ???)

How long does it take for them to die. It actually looks better now than it did when it first arrived. Thanks so much for the input. I have been out of the hobby for a long time and boy has it changed. I was pretty successful in the late 80's. I had some really good looking tanks back then. It actually seems as though it might be easier this time around with all of the advances in the understanding of the enviroment that is needed to sustain these wonders of the sea. If all works out over the next 4 or 5 years I want to have several thousand gallons of display and propagation tanks in a closed loop system around my house. I'm really enjoying getting this 300 gallon tank going.

Thanks Again, and I'm sure I'll have more questions ....
Mark

/mh

[CSeaSee]

I'd just watch your sponge for now. You'll probably notice if it starts to go south- if it does, pull it out fast, unless you enjoy massive troubleshooting. Coal City, IL, by chance?

[mistermikev]

CSeaSee, what trouble? Just curious. I have quite a few sponges and am in love with the blue sponge... someday. I get a lot of yellow sponge cropping up all over. then I have some black sponge - just a small piece. I also have a large orange finger sponge... lady at the fish store pulls it completely out of the water and tells me "no, these can touch air, it's no big deal". I knew she was full of balogna. None the less my finger sponge is on the road to recovery, it had some hair algae crop up but a lovely sponge crab I have ate it all like it was going out of style. Now it is looking good again. Anywho, I would watch for hair algae. It grows well on dying stuff. It took about a month before mine started to look bad, now it is looking good again. I didn't want to pull it before I gave it a chance to recoup. It did spike some amonia but I have a fluval and it knocked it out pretty quick.

[CSeaSee]

mistermikev, I'd say you were lucky in your sponge recovery- most of the time air-exposed sponges don't recover, because they lack the necessary physiology to remove air from their cells. They usually die slowly (months), releasing organics and noxious chemicals into the water the whole time. Those that survive usually evolved in tidal areas.
An article written by Dr. Toonan explains it quite nicely- "The reason that removing sponges from the water typically proves lethal to these animals has to do with these mechanisms of water transport. If you remove the sponge from the water, airlocks often form in the channels of the aquiferous system, and with only a flagellum to move water, there is no way to force that air out of their body. The choanocytes soon die, and that leads to a general necrosis in the area, typically proving fatal. This may sound ridiculous to you, but consider yourself as a choanocyte. I give you a jump-rope to move water over yourself and gather food and exchange wastes (this sounds silly, but it's basically to scale). You're sitting there whipping your skipping-rope back and forth to push water through the pipeline in which you live, when the water flow is cut off and your pipe drains. Your pipe is at an odd angle, such that when the water is turned back on, you're trapped in a bubble. Think you can swing that skipping-rope back-and-forth hard enough to push the air out of your pipe? It essentially works the same way for the sponge. That trapped air causes those cells in the area to die, and as they decompose, they produce gas which makes the problem worse, and the sponge starts to decay right before your eyes… The best way to deal with a dying area in your sponge is to cut that portion of the animal away and discard it. Although this sounds a little extreme, it will greatly increase the chance of survival for your animal if you can cut away the sickly region and leave only healthy tissue behind." The link is provided: Aquarium Invertebrates

[mhender]

Sure is ! You know the area?

I'd just watch your sponge for now. You'll probably notice if it starts to go south- if it does, pull it out fast, unless you enjoy massive troubleshooting. Coal City, IL, by chance?

[CSeaSee]

I student taught at Lisle last spring and coached their boys' track team- we visited you guys a couple of times. The Interstate 8 conference really let me get to know the south south suburbs... hehe. Where on Earth do you get your fish down there? Surely there can't be many stores...

[mistermikev]

CSeaSee, I see that perhaps I'm not out of the woods yet. My sponge has only been in my tank for approx 3 months. Still, when I recently moved my tank down from green bay to milwaukee I took every piece of live rock I had out of the water and put it in buckets... all my yellow sponge seems to be ok. No visible signs of trouble... I guess we will see. My water tests perfect. As the article you pointed out suggests to "remove the dead areas", I wonder if I should have tried "skinning" the outer layer of my finger sponge. it seems to be doing ok now, there are a few clear spots at the tip of one area but other than that it is fine.