Help identifying?

[tristaw35]

Not sure exactly what this is. It was suggested that it is a sponge of some type. It is not cyno. Doesn't blow off the rocks. Did use live rock and sand, tank is two weeks old. Doing a fish in cycle. Did add a CUC of 12 various snails and hermit crabs with a conch. My phosphates and nitrates did bottom out and I'll be dosing for that.

 

[KrisReef]

I'm sticking with sponge, but it might be a colonial tunicate, possibly a bryozoan, or some other creature that God spoke into existence?

I think the tank was recently set up, so the question I have is how fast is this spreading, is it growing quickly across the reef scape? My policy is to remove rocks or frags that have quickly spreading unknown growths to prevent widespread invasions that may harm livestock. I would probably let this one go unless it is spreading like wildfire. It's a nice looking thing, but I wouldn't set up a tank just for it.

And because I haven't changed my mind after the first look I feel compelled to compose a very long reply, symbolic of the fear that your tank may get completely encrusted with "Mystery Red" and that you would have to tear down and brush, scrape, or chemically burn the MR in a later effort to eradicate it from your system.

I have had to remove, scrape, and wipe down rocks and frags and equipment when I chose to bring home a new colony of maricultured coral that had a pretty red growth that looked like a tumbleweed attached to the base, some interesting stuff comes in from the ocean and I figured that I would let it grow and keep it trimmed or just pluck it out if it turned out to be a problem, for some reason. It was a plant that I watched grow at a moderate rate until it started crowding out the space between the corals that were near it. I gave it a trimming, it was easy to remove the branches but the holdfast was firmly attached to the maricultural frag plug and it had also attached itself in a few places to the neighboring rocks.

Can you guess where this story is going?

But I promised a long and detailed response, as today I am waiting for the parcel delivery person to drop a box of fragments from SBB (https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/sbb-back-to-school-350-auctions-going-on-now.1127518/ )

and while we wait for this shipment to arrive I need to distract myself from the worry that the package didn't actually ship out yesterday but is going to be sent out next week instead? I get confused about things as I don't hear very much anymore and my brain is falling asleep and I sort of drift in and out of mindfulness daydreaming and contemplating eternity and what might happen to my wicked soul once I have stopped breathing? (Well I bet you didn't see that plot twist coming, but that's OK because I didn't anticipate this distraction in the storyline either, so I hope you are still with me because I have a promise to keep.)

So back then, has it been 7 years since I first got invaded by a still unidentified red algae, possibly a wire algae, I watched it grow and spread for a month or two and it was starting to be obvious that it was able to outgrow corals and smother almost any small frag that it bumped into and it had the fortitude to grow in clumps that would expand and start stealing light and nutrients and living spaces so that even healthy established colonies were in danger. It had to go. I started by policing the area where It had first been introduced and it was then that i realized that it was able to grow aggressively into, among, around and over anything that was in it's path. I removed all that I could see and scrape off, pulling out frags and rocks and cleaning them of the red wiry plant and I did a fairly complete job of removing it once I realized the threat that it was.

I still had this plant sprouting in random places in the tank until about a year ago when I moved the tank, put it on a new stand, and sterilized the tank while the few surviving corals and a few of the rocks I kept waited in a plastic storage bin as I rebooted the system.

What was it?

I never did get a positive identification. It may have been an undescribed species of algae. Hobby folks I showed this stuff to did not have an answer and I was not able to find an image or reference on line that matched the creature that overran my reef tank and caused me years of grief as I attempted to scrape, wipe, chemically burn the thing for many years before I gave up and let it be. Probably the most interesting aspect of that invasion was that eventually the Red Wirey Algae? From Hell was knocked back so that it wasn't covering the tank and it stopped growing so aggressively. It would pop up in random place, on a powerhead, or the return nozzle, or in a spot among the rocks and If I scraped it off it may come back, or not?

I had been growing coral for a LFS buddy until that invasion. After it exploded in my tank, I was afraid to bring in frags to the store because I didn't want to spread that pest to another system.

Kenya trees, plating montipora, photosynthetic blue sponge, metallic blue mushrooms, green hairy mushrooms, and organ pipe coral, and inferno anemones have replaced my red wire algae (invasive threat) problem in the current woes and challenges of reef keeping in my tank.

I hope my short story will encourage anyone that reads it to take care when adding anything unknown, or known into their reefs if it has the potential or reputation for explosive, expansive, invasive growth in captivity.

I forgot to mention pocilloporid's. Pretty, but often found to exhibit growth in "pest mode" in some cases, with other folks reporting difficulty in keeping this sps alive in their systems?

Caution is/may be warranted and I will finish this post by noting that the image that shows where you scraped the subject was a fantastic addition for aiding in this discussion! I hope someone is able to positively identify this growth for us.