help ID these, please.

[Anonymous]

any idea what the white things in this photo are?

thanks in advance.

[ August 26, 2001: Message edited by: yancey ]

 

[Anonymous]

sorry, looks like the photo didn't make it. why am i paying for photopoint when it doesn't work?

 

[tanzy]

I see your picture. You mean the white lumpy stuff? Looks like dead calcareous algae to me.

 

[Anonymous]

no, actuially i meant the offwhite/yellowish fuzzy balls immediately to the right of the coral and right above the zoanthid polyps.

 

[MedicineMan1]

I have many of those things in my tank. I'm not sure what they are but I call them sponges. They don't hurt anything so I'd just leave them be and be happy!

 

[Demose]

They are a sponge but they normaly grow in the shade?? i have a few here and there and they always grow in the shadows when i moved my rock one got turned up to the lights and it sorta disolved?? i dunno maybee a diffrent species but they are a sponge of some type

 

[tanzy]

Like everyone says, they are most likely a kind of sponge. They don't usually stay up in the light very long. By the way, they can move.

 

[SuperLeet]

and, if you had the kind of sponge i had, it can dissolve your rock. You can tell if it does this by looking for other intake sipons around the rock. hehe I dried one of the rocks with the sponge, and the rock was basically hollow, now i know how figi rock becomes so porous

 

[tanzy]

The sponges I am talking about are Cinachyrella sp. ball sponges. When they first came on the LR, I placed the rock in such a way that they were at the top, facing the light. Obviously, they didn't like it there and they just dropped off and rolled around on the sand for a few days. I notice one got attached to the rock with some thin filaments which it grew from its base.
Over a couple of weeks, the sponge "crawled" up the rock into a shady ledge. I wish I could post some photos of the stuff that it uses to "stick" to the rock, but my camera won't be able to capture it.
I'm not trying to be defensive here, but it did happen.
By the way, they are squishy and I enjoy pressing them!

 

[davelin315]

It looks like a sponge to me. However, I have to disagree with tanzy. Sponges do not have the ability to move as they are more or less encrusting. They do not have legs or any sort of appendage to aid in locomotion, nor do they have any ability to use a piece of flesh (since they don't have any) to slide like a snail. They are basically cells that are attached to each other that build upon each other. The only way they can move is by growing in a certain direction and dying off where it started, but you will still see a skeleton of some sort left behind for a bit. If it moves, it's not a sponge. No Flame intended!