ID Please

[audioaddiction]

saw lots of growth on this peice of live rock that just came in at Petco today so grabbed it with my employee discount for $5 (1 pound). it has mushroom looking growth, and green grass looking growth on it. i just found that it also came with a very very small starfish which is great , hopefully it will survive. i have two scooter blenny type fish that i'm worried will pick at this rock with horrific results! i want to catch them and get them out of this tank but it's proving to be nearly impossible with all the rock to hide in... i need to set up some sort of trap. but anyway, what is this stuff?

update: i have isolated the rock in it's own private section of the tank for now

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[Travis L. Stevens]

Those are basic Discosoma species mushrooms, and the algae looks like Bryopsis from the left hand side of the first picture. Either way, it's a green hair algae. Also, those mushrooms don't look very happy. FWIW, if you have Scooter Blennies, they are planktivores and will eat small fauna such as copepods, isopods, amphipods, etc. They need a fairly large tank in order to get their proper nutrition, or they will slowly starve to death unless you can get them to consistently eat prepared foods of quality value (not brine shrimp). And both of them in a 20g will lend to disaster in a very short amount of time.

 

[audioaddiction]

that's what i heard from someone else, about the blennies. it seems the only way i'll be able to catch them will be to take most of the rock out of the tank! i've seen them munch on flake food but they spit atleast some of it back out. i'll be working on feeding them or removing them now... they are smart and quick so it's proving difficult thanks for the info on the mushrooms and algae, i'm trying to revive them

 

[kiknchikn]

They look like ticked off discosomas to me too. If the algae is indeed Bryopsis then you might want to try to get rid of it while you can. It can be a nuisance.

A bit of advice that you should take to heart... don't buy something for your tank unless you've thoroughly researched it and know what you're getting into. You get yourself in trouble quickly if you don't and it's not fair to the critters either. I think we're all guilty of doing it at times, but its a bad habit to get into and leads to a lot of frustration from what I've seen.

 

[audioaddiction]

very nice reef page Mike, and you're right about being careful purchasing. i mostly online research critters before i buy but this peice was covered in so much strange stuff i had to grab it before my coworkers did ::rolleye1:

im thinking of getting a 75 gallon tank around christmas and setting it up as the main tank for everything safe and using this 20 gallon tank to grow things and tryout different creatures. yesss

 

[Jshock]

Do you have 2 scooters in your 20g? I didnt have very much luck in my 20 with one. It ate all the pods quickly and later starved to death. He lived for about 6 months and was one of my favorite fish. If they start to act kinda sad and dont scoot as much as they used to it could be a sign of them running out of food.

 

[kiknchikn]

Thanks, I'm still working on the page. I'm actually way behind on the pictures thanks to the end-of-semester frenzy. Hopefully in the next week or so I'll catch back up.

If you get the 75 up and running you should consider ultimately turning the 20 into a quarantine tank. That's what I plan to do with my current tank when I finally buy a house and start a bigger tank.

 

[audioaddiction]

Jshock, yeah i do have two and now that my tank has been cleaned and cleared of the tons of rocks with the exception of a few peices, i can finally catch these guys and let them go where i found them at the dock. i think they might have enjoyed my tank though, it's peacefulness and lack of predators

ok can anyone tell me if my hermit crab or shrimp is going to terrorize these mushrooms if i put this rock in there with them growing on it? he's crawling all over the other peice of regular live rock picking all sorts of things. i see reef tanks all over the place with tons of crabs but their fragile stuff seems ok. maybe this is because they have such an abundance of it?

 

[kiknchikn]

What kind of hermit crab? The typical kinds sold in stores (blue leg, mexican red leg, scarlet reef, etc) just crawl over corals indiscriminately (which can be very annoying) but they don't eat them unless they're already dead from what I've seen in my limited experience.

Some species of shrimp will pick at soft corals (camel shrimp for one) so you'll have to tell us what kind of shrimp it is.

 

[audioaddiction]

ahh, they are both from the coast around where i live, definitely just your run of the mill shrimp, about the size of a cleaner shrimp though. and the crab is of none that you listed, but will probably crawl over fragile stuff without a care, like you say yours do. he probably wont eat the live mushrooms or baby starfish but probably some other stuff. i just put the rock in with them not long ago so i'm monitoring it. i'll let you guys know how it goes! thanks kiknchikn