ID Please - Fuzzy white tube - Worms?

[Anonymous]

These started growing a couple weeks ago and have populated the lower-light areas of a fairly new piece of made rock.. Can't see where they're harmful or beneficial, but curious if anyone's seen them before / can ID them...??

Sorry, but these are as good as I could get...

 

[danmhippo]

No, I don't think those are tube worms. Check with the HitchHiker FAQ:
www.reefs.org/hhfaq

 

[Anonymous]

It's strange how it looks like they have feeding tentacles out the ends of them though... They're not closed off/pill-looking like I would expect from some sort of sponge, but who knows...??

I think Coralshrimp said in a post a year back or so that she had something like these too. Don't know if she ever ID'd them or not, I'll PM her later tonight and ask.

But yeah, I went up and down the faq and cross-searched other boards looking for them too.. - Nada

 

[Will C1]

their sponges, quite comon i have thousands of them in my sump and refugiums

 

[danmhippo]

I think you have these sponges (off 3rd page of faq page):

All over my tank, sump, and overflows I see what look like grains of white rice. They also seen to have a small tube like extension on one end.
You may have a small species of sponge, probably Leucilla,Leucandra, Scypha = Sycon, or Clathrina. These small sponges are often missed in nature due to their small size, but they are usually seen in our small glass boxes. They are taxonomically found in Class: Calcarea. More information on sponges in general is in Rob's Aquarium.net article http://www.aquarium.net/1196/1196_7.shtml

 

[Anonymous]

Yeah, I looked at that section of the faq long and hard before I asked here.. But sponges with feeding "feathers" though?? Does that seem right?? They only resemble the pic there in that they have the same basic shape and close to the same size. In the pic they don't look nearly as fuzzy as mine.. Mine look like if they were fish they'd have a month or two worth of ich or something..

If that's what they are though... - Thanks!

 

[Anonymous]

Looks much more like a tunicate, to me, but those pics are difficult to make out. They have a fairly short lifecycle, IIRC.

 

[Anonymous]

those look exactly like the sponges i've had, and seen in many others folks tanks, 'explode' all over the place, occasionally

you should be seeing tiny 'hairs' on the upper (unattached) end, along the 'collar' (looks like an inverted 'v')

check inside your skimmer, too

 

[Anonymous]

Oh man you gotta be kiddin me?!? These nasty lookin suckers will grow in my skimmer too???

Which pic looks like what you've seen Vitz? To me, my pics don't look like the sponges from the faq, but maybe I'm being too critical...??

I dug around trying to find pics of tunicates that matched up with what I have, but everything I found looked WAAAAAAY nicer than the nasty fuzzy balls my tank is growin!

Whatever they are they appear to just look ugly and that's about it.. Water quality still seems pretty good.. No idea on specifics though, all I have is the cheapy Marine Lab test kit.. (It's not bad for what it shows though, I've checked it against one good LFS's tests and one bad LFS's tests and they all showed the same..)

 

[Anonymous]

both of the pics in your first post look exactly like the sponges i've seen many times in many tanks :wink:

one of the giveaways is the small inverted 'V' at the top of the body

they do no harm, and prolly are helping out the system via their filter feeding

seems that they usually die back quite abit, eventually

don't freak :wink:

 

[Anonymous]

"don't freak" hehehe

Somethin tells me you're gettin to know me too well! Thanks bud..

And thanks everyone!