That raises the question as to whose filaments they are. I didn't spend a lot of time looking at it, but the ones on the ORA Yellow Fuzzy that had the encounter with the favia appeared to be along the margin of sickly looking tissue and exposed skeleton. That leads me to believe that they are still soldiers of the favias that are continuing their work.
The majority of the ones I saw on the stag were in or around a polyp like the picture I took of the P-shaped one - ok, so far nothing abnormal there. The first ones I noticed on the stag were moving around inside one of the skeletal cavities where the tissue had opened up. So here you have degenerated deformed coral structure in the presence of potentially aggressive digestive filaments. I put 2 and 2 together and get a pretty definitive 4.
I'd buy that a frag laying on a large favia would easily fall victim to a vomit attack. One would think that if the assaulted coral was moved to a safe place that it wouldn't still be getting eaten alive by the original filaments a week or two later.
Can they really last that long and do so much damage in relatively small numbers?
If the coral is weakened and doesn't recover quick enough, can a couple of this filaments finish it off?
Assuming for the sake of argument that the two corals' situations which exhibit the same filament presence are totally unrelated, the stag's lesions are either sites of attack of another coral's mfs or the result of it's own mfs digesting itself. This is also assuming that mfs are responsible for the degeneration which is probably a safe bet since that's what they do and I've seen them in the degenerated cavities.
Assuming that these things have a finite effective lifetime, isolating the affected corals should give them the best chance for waiting out the remaining assault and recovering....assuming they aren't being liquefied by their own mfs, which sounds much less likely.
I wish I had looked at the Yellow Fuzzy a little more to see where those filaments were attached - at a polyp or out in the general tissue.
I haven't seen anything that says they can or cannot be "spit" from one coral to another, becoming free-floating to attack at will. They are different from sweeper tentacles though. I vaguely recall having to reposition the stag a week or so ago because it shifted but I don't think it fell enough that it was actually touching another coral. I'm not 100% sure though but they had to get there somehow. The closest coral, another acro, was about 3 inches away.
The majority of the ones I saw on the stag were in or around a polyp like the picture I took of the P-shaped one - ok, so far nothing abnormal there. The first ones I noticed on the stag were moving around inside one of the skeletal cavities where the tissue had opened up. So here you have degenerated deformed coral structure in the presence of potentially aggressive digestive filaments. I put 2 and 2 together and get a pretty definitive 4.
I'd buy that a frag laying on a large favia would easily fall victim to a vomit attack. One would think that if the assaulted coral was moved to a safe place that it wouldn't still be getting eaten alive by the original filaments a week or two later.
Can they really last that long and do so much damage in relatively small numbers?
If the coral is weakened and doesn't recover quick enough, can a couple of this filaments finish it off?
Assuming for the sake of argument that the two corals' situations which exhibit the same filament presence are totally unrelated, the stag's lesions are either sites of attack of another coral's mfs or the result of it's own mfs digesting itself. This is also assuming that mfs are responsible for the degeneration which is probably a safe bet since that's what they do and I've seen them in the degenerated cavities.
Assuming that these things have a finite effective lifetime, isolating the affected corals should give them the best chance for waiting out the remaining assault and recovering....assuming they aren't being liquefied by their own mfs, which sounds much less likely.
I wish I had looked at the Yellow Fuzzy a little more to see where those filaments were attached - at a polyp or out in the general tissue.
I haven't seen anything that says they can or cannot be "spit" from one coral to another, becoming free-floating to attack at will. They are different from sweeper tentacles though. I vaguely recall having to reposition the stag a week or so ago because it shifted but I don't think it fell enough that it was actually touching another coral. I'm not 100% sure though but they had to get there somehow. The closest coral, another acro, was about 3 inches away.
