Sessile filter feed - Tunicate?

[JulesH]

Hi, I was wondering if anyone has come across this beastie in their tanks? It has been growing on a rock in my tank for the last six months. I think it is some sort of Tunicate? It lives happily amongst the zoos and palythoas.

One of the things I love about marine reef keeping are the additional animals that come with a frag no matter how much you dip them, so good some not so.

Thanks

Julian

 

[Tired]

Looks like a tunicate, yep. If it's been growing, congrats on the tank-suitable species! A lot of them don't do well in aquariums.

Fun fact: that's a chordate. It has a simple spinal cord as a larva, and is our closest non-vertebrate relative. Baby tunicates are little tadpole-like creatures that even have brains, and then they eventually glue their heads to rocks and turn into little bags of water.

 

[JulesH]

Thank you for the informative reply. I love the red stripes on what looks like the inside of the tunicate. I shall be looking up chordate.

Regards

Julian

 

[Tired]

"Chordate" describes a member of Chordata, a phylum of animals that have notochords, (primitive spinal cords) at some point in their lifespan. Chordata is comprised of tunicates, lancelets (which are sort of like boneless fish), and all vertebrates.

File:AnimalsRelativeNumbers.png - Wikimedia Commons

commons.wikimedia.org

Check out how outnumbered us chordates are! And this chart was made before the discovery that there may well be a species of parasitic wasp for every other species of insect- we're even more outnumbered than it shows.