Sponge overtaking a zoa

[Carmen]

I tried to load a picture to show everyone, but for some reason am unable to do so. There is a sponge, light pink in color that's beginning to overtake a pretty nice zoa. It was on the bottom of the rock at first but has begun to spread to the bottom of the zoa and has covered some of the heads. How does everyone deal with this kind of thing?

 

[heathd.hd]

Scrape it out. I had the same issue.

 

[Carmen]

Scrape it out. I had the same issue.

What did you use and did the sponge ever come back?

 

[vic67]

I also scraped one that was overtaking a zoa frag. I used a wooden skewer to get between the polyps and a razor blade for the lager parts.

 

[FL_Reefer]

I use a pair of tweezers and just pick them off

 

[Carmen]

Okay, thanks! Any problem with the sponge returning?

 

[NoStRaThOmAs]

I used a small thermostat screwdriver and scraped carefully between them. Try and get all of the sponge out of the tank with a turkey Baster so it doesn't spread. Mine came back so I just repeated the process over again.

 

[joshporksandwich]

If you can take out the rock i blast it with water if not like others sugested tweezers and scrapping

 

[Carmen]

This is what I did yesterday. A reefing friend told me to expose the sponge to air and poke holes in it. Fortunately, the zoa was on a rock I had glued to a much larger rock. I was able to pick it off and expose it to air. Randy Holmes-Farley, I feel like I'm confessing or something, because then I used a small syringe loaded with 6% HP and boiled the $@%* thing off. Carefully picked and scraped between the zoas to get pieces off, cleaning it frequently with a bowl of aquarium water. Once I was satisfied that all the pieces were out and the rock was clean I put it back in the aquarium. Zoas on the far end of the rock opened almost immediately. The ones where the sponge was, was closed. But this morning they are open and look great. There's spaces on the rock where the sponge used to be. But I think it was successful.