Mystery Grass - Pictures Attached

[nonntt]

I have a 12g nano, about 3 yrs old, mixed reef. I stay on top of things pretty well - water changes, etc. All my levels are fine but over the last couple years, this reddish purple grass has started to take over all of my rock. It appears to be a grass-like grwoth more than a slimy green algae type grass. LFS was no help. I'm stumped.

Check out the attached pics

Has anyone seen this before?

Do I have any options besides replacing all my rock?

Thanks

N

 

[nonntt]

Is this a real stumper?

Has anyone seen this?

Is this site the right place to reach out to with my question?

Any feedback is appreciated.

 

[sdbarton42]

you might want to try putting it on a different topic (general reefkeeping possibly). there aren't very many people on this one (nanos) that will respond. I didn't get much response with my post but alot of people look at general reefkeeping so I'd try reposting it there! sorry i'm no help with the grass! I'm new to this. but no worries the people who do help on here are really nice!

 

[Anonymous]

Hmm, all I get when I look at that is "some kind of purple hair algae?" so I'm not much help either. Good advice from sdbarton though, try posting the pics in the GRD.

BTW, I did have a look at these sites, but couldn't see anything that matched. Still might be useful in the future though.

http://www.starfish.ch/c-invertebrates/plants.html

http://www.poppe-images.com/images/by_family.php?category=algae

http://www.melevsreef.com/id/algae.html

 

[Anonymous]

I used to have an algae ID site bookmarked, now I can't remember the name of it to save my life. My suggestion would be to write this in to the kind folks at WetWebMedia (dot com).

 

[nonntt]

Thanks. Good advice all around. I'll repost on the big board and check out the references.

I didn't think there was much that the experts hadn't seen before, but maybe I have a real obscure problem that could take some legwork to solve.

Thanks again.

 

[Anonymous]

Is it a problem, though? Or just an unknown? It doesn't look bad at all to me.

 

[Anonymous]

Its a red turf algae. I had something similar in one of my reef tanks years ago. Somewhat slow growing but it does advance. You can probably peel larger clumps off but the spot where it was on the live rock will eventually regrow.

For IDing algae you could try www.algaebase.org. Its not the easiest to navigate but has a fair amount of photos. Pretty sure I have the general genus of the species in your tank but I need to check my notes.

 

[brandon4291]

asparagopsis taxiformis. my gosh Im so sorry man I was never able to recover from this but if there's a way I'd love to see it I wish you the best

 

[brandon4291]

this doesn't show up like the ubiquitous airborne-spore hitchhikers we are used to in other algae genera...from what I can tell it's a mad hitchhiker that comes in physically on live rock and coral frag bases. In all the pico systems Ive done where I got lazy and hair algae formed and then either killed the tank or was beaten back with good husbandry reinstatement, I've only had asparagopsis once and it was in the first reefbowl it was personally devastating. I started seeing it in my local fish store's frag tank thereafter...the only way I know to treat it is with boyds chemi clean but it still came back vengefully but maybe my dosing wasn't correct because I was having to ad lib it for a one gallon highly aged setup. I believe I've seen others do things like phosphate pads and direct removal of live rock/replacement just for more ideas

watch your iodine additions when battling red stuff of many genera (meaning lessen or stop Ia dosing) slimy and spiky as well. just found this article that confirms some of the suspicion of this growth but there appears to be good news in the battle against it:

http://www.aquatouch.com/algae.htm

(edit 1/5: Saw similar pictures on marinedepot.com in Eric Borneman's forum and asked him about asparagopsis and he felt sure these were not. Having said that, the control methods linked above are what Im seeing as I look across threads on the subject fwiw)