What are these things?

[readingbabelfish]

I have had this set up for almost a year. This green mat-like coral thing has been on the rock since I have bought it and is getting big, what is it? Also these feather-duster things have spread throughout the tank and they were not there when I set all this up, what are they? I have also had this red slime junk growing on my sand, and sometimes the walls of the tank, it is prevelant most when the lights are on, it kind of goes away at night, what is it? Thank you so much for all your help!

[sland165]

As for the feather duster like things, you have aiptasia my friend, the hell of reefs. There are many ways to get rid of them, some better than others, but get them under control before they take over your tank, and they will. The second picture looks like a mushroom of some kind, but could be wrong, and the red slime stuff is cyano. What are your tank parameters, light schedule, etc..For the aiptasia commerical products such as Joe's Juice have worked very well, but one trick I always use is take the rock out the water, get a bbq grill lighter and burn the aiptasia until it sizzles, I have never had a come back. Do not try to pull at them in the water as you will only increase the spores floating in the tank, and recreate more. For the cyano, tank parameters are a must to help, also your light schedule, but it can be beat, try vacuming it up off the sand bed to help stop the growth.

[reeferbill]

I have had this set up for almost a year. This green mat-like coral thing has been on the rock since I have bought it and is getting big, what is it? Also these feather-duster things have spread throughout the tank and they were not there when I set all this up, what are they? I have also had this red slime junk growing on my sand, and sometimes the walls of the tank, it is prevelant most when the lights are on, it kind of goes away at night, what is it? Thank you so much for all your help!

The bigger flat thing is an anenome mushroom coral which is a good thing but the others are aptasia and that is a bad thing. Also the red slime is cyanbacteria cuased by poor water quality , over feeding or high phosphates. Stepping up water changes making sure all food is eaten and if phosphates are still present you could add a Two Little Fishes Phosban Reactor. That should help cotroll the red slime. Now the aptasia cannot be cleaned off by hand because every piece that breaks off or is still in the rock will grow back. You can burn them off by removing the rock and burn with a long barbarcue lighter and replacing,or mix a paste off kualkwassuer or seachems powdered advantage calcium and inject directly into its mouth which will cause them to melt. Two Naturel methods are adding 3-6 peppermit shrimp or a copperbanded butterfly which has worked for me.

[readingbabelfish]

Thanks for the info. I am not going to take out all my rock because I have zoo colonies that are attached to areas where the rocks come together. I think I will try a few peppermint shrimp, I do have 1 cleaner shrimp in there already. As for the cyano, I have used only ro water, I feed very sparingly, and the phosephates all are near zero. I have tested my water and according to tests, the water is in great condition. How much water should be changed from my 75g and how often? My salinity is a 1.028-9, is that too high? My lights are 2-175w MH, and they are on for 5 hours with 12000k bulbs. Also there are 4 48" t5 bulbs, two daylight and two actinic, for a total of 216 watts powered by an icecap 660 electronic ballast for 5.5 hours. So i have my lights on from 1030 to 4 daily. Any suggestions on lighting? I have an Acan colony and zoo colony, any suggestions? Thanks again!

[reeferbill]

Thanks for the info. I am not going to take out all my rock because I have zoo colonies that are attached to areas where the rocks come together. I think I will try a few peppermint shrimp, I do have 1 cleaner shrimp in there already. As for the cyano, I have used only ro water, I feed very sparingly, and the phosephates all are near zero. I have tested my water and according to tests, the water is in great condition. How much water should be changed from my 75g and how often? My salinity is a 1.028-9, is that too high? My lights are 2-175w MH, and they are on for 5 hours with 12000k bulbs. Also there are 4 48" t5 bulbs, two daylight and two actinic, for a total of 216 watts powered by an icecap 660 electronic ballast for 5.5 hours. So i have my lights on from 1030 to 4 daily. Any suggestions on lighting? I have an Acan colony and zoo colony, any suggestions? Thanks again!

I use to have a 75 reef and did a 20 gallon water change every 2-weeks but I would try blowing off the live rock with a power head or turkey bastor before each water change plus do 10 gallon water changes every week to see what happens . Make sure your new water is mixed and airated for atleast 24 hours. Or mak e up your next change water after each water change and your good to go!!! I also keep my lights on for 12 hours/ day.

[Ninong]

Also these feather-duster things have spread throughout the tank and they were not there when I set all this up, what are they?

Wow! What a beautiful example of Aiptasia. I can't remember anyone posting such a clear photo before.

Yes, these things are very, very bad pests! It's important that you get rid of them as soon as possible. Peppermint shrimp (Lysmata wurdemanni) will eat them, assuming you get real L. wurdemanni. Sometimes vendors ship a different, look-alike species that doesn't eat them.

Unfortunately, peppermint shrimp rarely get rid of all of them. Especially when you have so many and they are so well established. A copperbanded butterflyfish (Chelmon rostratus) will usually eat them eventually and it's probably a better biological control than peppermint shrimp. Unfortunately, it's difficult to find a healthy one and even more difficult to keep it healthy in a 75-gallon aquarium.

There are several effective methods of getting rid of Aiptasia and virtually all of them have been discussed in previous posts. If you go to the top of the Reef Aquariums forum and click on Search Forum and then enter Aiptasia, you will get 357 results. That's way too many for me, so I usually click on Advanced Search and then narrow it down by member (author).

So, let me see how many times I have responded on the topic of Aiptasia. Okay, I'll click on Search Forum, now I'll click on Advanced Search. Now I'll enter Aiptasia as the Keyword and Ninong as the User Name, then I'll drop down to where it says show results as Posts. Well that's a little better. I've only talked about it 114 times in 78 different threads. Actually it's really more than that but we are missing a couple of years of threads.

This was my most recent post on 8-21-2010:

Re: can some one tell me what these are....

Maybe I'll add a quick summary of the various methods:

(1) Inject the individual anemones with vinegar. Don't do more than about a dozen a day because the vinegar lowers the pH.

(2) Inject them with fresh lemon juice or concentrated lemon juice.

(3) Inject them with Kalkwasser paste (strong solution of Kalkwasser -- calcium hydroxide solution). Heat this up first to make it even more effective.

(4) Try one of the commercial products, such as Joe's Juice or Aiptasia-X. That Aiptasia-X looks very promising.

Biological methods:

(1) Add a few peppermint shrimp (Lysmata wurdemanni). Usually works but sometimes not 100%.

(2) Add a few Berghia verrucicornis nudibranchs. This always works but it's expensive (they cost a lot) and your best shot is if the nudibranchs breed in your tank so that you have a larger herd of them. They eat Aiptasia and only Aiptasia. They eat any size of Aiptasia. They're small and they are quite likely to go over your overflow and end up in your sump. When they run out of Aiptasia to eat, they starve to death.

(3) Add a Chelmon rostratus (Copperband butterflyfish) to your tank but only if your tank is at least 135-gallons and 6-ft long. This is usually very effective but you can't do this in a smaller tank. There are a few other butterflyfishes that will also do the job but the copperband is the least risky of the bunch.

I have also had this red slime junk growing on my sand, and sometimes the walls of the tank, it is prevelant most when the lights are on, it kind of goes away at night, what is it? Thank you so much for all your help!

That's Cyanobacteria. The reasons it seems to diminish a lot at night and then increase in size during the daytime is because it's photosynthetic.

Alright let me see how many previous posts I have on Cyanobacteria. Only 115.

Here's my Cyanobacteria post from 9-17-2010:

Re: Algae on my sand

Here's a post that I put up on cyanobacteria back in July 2002.

The only thing I would add to that is that even though nitrogen is the limiting nutrient, phosphate can be used as a way to control cyanobacteria because without adequate phosphate, cyanobacteria is unable to complete a vital step in the photosynthesis process that is a necessary part of its survival. Therefore, controlling phosphate with iron oxide adsorbing media is an important part in the battle against cyanobacteria.

Oh, and I no longer subscribe to the position that it can be classified as either blue-green algae or cyanobacteria. Only hardcore botanists still cling to the idea that cyanobacteria is blue-green algae.


That's the new three-domain system from 1990. Even if you go back to the old five-domain system, cyanobacteria was always in Monera (bacteria), it was never in Plantae (plants). It has been bacteria for at least the last four or five decades but some botanists must be using texts from the 19th century.

And here is my post from 7-15-2002 which I referenced above:

Originally posted by Reefland
Sure is weird that the 10k's don't cause the outbreak like the 6500's.

Not really. Rather than type out a detailed explanation, I have decided to just cut and paste my rather exhaustive and boring comments from an old Reef Central thread that I responded to a few months back. I have placed the specific answer to the light dilemma in bold.

Here goes... try not to fall asleep:

Cyanobacteria can be properly classified as either blue-green algae or cyanobacteria bacteria. And, yes, it is photosynthetic bacteria that does seem to raise its ugly head in response to deteriorating aquarium lighting--specifically when lamps begin to shift to red. It is also nutrient limited and prefers areas of stagnant current. Thus the typical advice to provide ample current flow over the area, employ good skimming to reduce nutrients and replace lamps, if necessary. While it is possible to temporarily fix the problem with antibiotics, it will return unless the conditions that it finds favorable are eliminated.

It's kinda difficult to completely eliminate something that has been around for some three billion years.

.....

The three-billion-years comment was humor. (But true!)

"While it is possible to temporarily fix the problem with antibiotics, it will return unless the conditions that it finds favorable are eliminated."--this is the thrust of my point.

The cautionary warnings against employing antibiotics relate to potential side effects and not to whether or not they work. The reason many people recommend against them is because they have absolutely nothing to do with changing the conditions that allow cyanobacteria to thrive.

Cyanobacteria will occupy any available hospitable space, either in nature or in an aquarium. There are natural controls that hold it in check that do not exist in aquaria. In a heavily stocked, well balanced aquarium the corals and other inhabitants will out-compete the cyano and it will not become a problem. You can have problems with cyano even if your water parameters all test normal.

.....

Originally posted by Aquaman:
"I have used Red slime remover back when I first started my reef tank. So I dosed the approprate amounts and yes it worked quite well, The problem is it dropped the oxygen level and as a result I lost a couple of clowns. Since I did not fix the cause it did come back although not any more so then before. I did find out later through trial and error my bulbs seemed to be the culprit. Since then I have not used it again and would rather fight my cyano problems by attacking the source rather than the symptom."

Ninong: Whenever using anything like that it is important that you siphon out as much of the dying cyanobacteria as possible to prevent what you experienced. Also, leaving the decaying algae in the tank just provides more nutrients to fuel a new bloom.

The limiting nutrient seems to be nitrogen. Phosphate and other nutrients play a role but nitrogen seems to be critical. When DOC levels rise and the pH is right, the temperature is right, and the lighting is right, cyanobacteria will appear. There are several families of cyanobacteria and dozens of species. Which species shows up depends on the conditions. I don't think it is possible to say that it has been permanently eliminated from a tank because it is in the air and can reestablish itself if the conditions are right.

The reason you noticed a change in the population of red slime algae in your tank when you changed your lighting is because you changed the equilibrium in the tank and made it less favorable to the red slime algae by removing lighting that was optimal. This was obviously enough to change the conditions to a less favorable environment. This is because blue-green algae (cyanobacteria) is really neither an algae nor a bacteria. It is both. From the standpoint of cell structure, it is a bacteria. In fact, it is so small that you need an electron microscope to study it. That red slimey stuff you see holding it together is just the exudate of the algae. Based on the fact that it is photosynthetic and contains pigments, it is an algae. (I changed my mind on this. It's not an algae. It's a bacteria that has many of the attributes of algae. It's a primordial link to both but I think it is more properly classified as photosynthetic bacteria.)

There are several classification models based on cell structure and method of reproduction, but they are not universally agreed upon. Some people like to call it blue-green algae and some like to call it cyanobacteria. No matter what you call it, it has properties of both algae and bacteria. The outer region of the cell contains the photosynthetic algal mechanism and the pigments. Which wavelengths of light are absorbed depends on which pigments are present. The most common red slime algae found in reef tanks has a lot of phycoerythrins, whose absorption level is optimized at 555-564 nm (the middle of the yellow band). This is why it has a tendency to pop up when lights start to get old and their spectral distribution starts shifting to longer wavelengths.

Red phycoerythrin is only one possible pigment. Blue phycocyanin and allophycocyanin are dominant in some species. These are optimized at different wavelengths and result in different color algae. Some species are opportunistic in the sense that they contain a mix of pigments and will utilize whichever pigment is favored by the aquarium lighting conditions.

All of these pigments are phycobiliproteins (not the same as chlorophyll and carotenoids) and are in the lipid layer. After the light energy is processed by phycobiliproteins in the photosynthesis II cycle it is transmitted to the photosynthesis I system and its chlorophyll-a.

So light can be a determining factor not only in whether cyanobacteria will appear but also in determining which species will appear. The type of nutrients (the source of the nitrogen) available seems to affect the method of reproduction and the size of the cells. You cannot have cyanobacteria without sufficient nutrients to feed it. So the first order of business in dealing with an outbreak would be to siphon out as much as possible and then do a fairly large water change to reduce the DOC. This is in addition to the permanent controls of making sure that the tank is adequately skimmed (unless you are using an alternate method of nutrient export), has good lighting and good water current. The reason for directing water current directly at the problem sites is because you are breaking up the slimey stuff that sticks the algae together. The red slimey stuff is exuded by the algae.

Some people seem to get some satisfaction by adding animals that eat red slime, like Strombus gigas, and this may help in controlling small patches of the stuff but I don't think it would make much difference if the conditions in the tank happened to become ideal for cyanobacteria. There is also speculation that cyanobacteria is more prevalent at different times of the year.

It is a very natural thing and I don't think the appearance of it in a tank is any indication of neglect on the part of the hobbyist. In fact, in a new tank you are just about guaranteed to experience it no matter what you do. The only reason I mentioned heavily stocked tanks having less of a problem is because all of the nutrients are taken up by the good animals in the tank, thus outcompeting the cyanobacteria.

.....

There, more than you ever really asked for.

The complete Reef Central thread, which is rather lengthy, is here: http://www.reefcentral.com/vbulletin...threadid=58041 (Fortunately for any of you who have actually read this far, that Reef Central thread has been removed. It has no doubt been relocated to their archives. Don't bother looking for it because it's ridiculously long and wordy and goes into too much detail.)

How much water should be changed from my 75g and how often?

This is a matter of personal preference. You might want to do 15-20% per month or you might prefer to do 10% twice a month. I wouldn't freak out over the cyano. It's not the end of the world. I probably said this in one of my earlier post (I never read them again -- too long!).

The cyano is going to take care of itself as the tank matures. If your water parameters, lighting and water current are all adequate, you'll get over this minor problem.

My salinity is a 1.028-9, is that too high?

It's not too high if you're doing a Red Sea or Persian Gulf biotope, but it's too high for a mixed reef aquarium that includes fish and corals from the Indo-Pacific region. Natural seawater is considered to be 35 PSU (35 ppt, 1.0264 SG). It's much lower than that at the poles, much higher than that in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf (up to 41-42 ppt), slightly higher in the Mediterranean Sea (37 ppt) and much higher at the bottom of the ocean at great depth.

Anyway, 35 ppt (1.0264 SG) is what you should shoot for in a reef tank. Anything in the range of 34-35 ppt (1.025-1.026 SG) is fine. Some people like to keep their salinity slightly lower in fish-only tanks but that's not a good idea in reef tanks. So I would lower the salinity if I were you. Do it gradually over the next week or two by removing small amounts of saltwater (a gallon at a time) and replacing it with freshwater (R.O./D.I. water). How are you measuring your salinity?

My lights are 2-175w MH, and they are on for 5 hours with 12000k bulbs. Also there are 4 48" t5 bulbs, two daylight and two actinic, for a total of 216 watts powered by an icecap 660 electronic ballast for 5.5 hours. So i have my lights on from 1030 to 4 daily.

Your lights should be on for a total of 12 hrs/day. Run the two actinic T5's 12 hrs/day. Run the two daylight T5's 10 hrs/day and the two 175w metal halides for 8 hrs/day. You won't be able to make this change all at once. You should do it gradually over the next six weeks. In other words, start the actinics 1 hr before the daylight T5's and 2 hrs before the metal halides. Turn off the halides 2 hrs before the actinics and 1 hr before the daylight T5's. Just make sure you take about six weeks to get up to that because that's a big difference from what you're doing now.

Good luck!

[MyNameIsJoe]

Just a little input from my recent experience (past few weeks):

I tried injecting vinegar---> aptasia shrunk and reappeared the next day.

Then I tried the Kalkawasser----> worked great, so far.
With the kalk mix, i didn't directly inject the aptasia. I just "squirted" the kalk near the mouth of the aptasia with a syringe. The aptasia swallow the kalk mix and close up... not to be seen again. Kalk is cheap, try it first.

Not sure how to follow-up the previous post ( I didn't read it in its entirety ), but just a little bit of quick info.

Good luck

[Ninong]

Not sure how to follow-up the previous post ( I didn't read it in its entirety )...

I didn't read it in its entirety either. At least not in the last 8 years or so.

I have never had Aiptasia myself, but I have seen a video clip of what happens when Aiptasia-X is used and it was fascinating. A small glob of Aiptasia-X is applied just above the mouth of the anemone and it gobbles it up like a 5-year-old eating Easter candy. Within a few seconds, it is a goner. It was amazing to see.

I just googled Aiptasia-X YouTube and got half a dozen video hits. Here's one: RedSea's Aiptasia-X in action. You don't have to actually inject anything into the anemone. It gobbles it up for you. Then, a few seconds later, it begins to die.