Xenia Snot

[JSB]

I just put a skimmer on my office tank which still has LOTS of micro bubbles. As I did this, my Xenia, or specifically the rock that it is growing on has started producing, as my co-workers describes it, snot. It looks pretty innocuous, but it won't go away. Anyone have an explanation:

It is the yellow stringy stuff cutting diagonally across the picture.

 

[STL]

Looks like a vermatid snail - follow the goo to the rock and you'll probably see a small snail in a tube. They cast out their lines of goo to collect debris to eat. Probably the water flow from the new skimmer is stirring up junk.

 

[JSB]

That's it. Positive ID. I think I'll take the rock out and break them off.

 

[H@rry]

That's it. Positive ID. I think I'll take the rock out and break them off.

Don't do it. They're good for your tank, part of your cleanup crew.

 

[JSB]

Really? Hmmm? I just considered them a snot factory. All right then... Spared by an 11th hour reprieve from Governor H@rry.

 

[Tomoko Schum]

I've got larger type vermitid snails in my 180, which put out huge amount of mucus strands. Their shells coil up on live rocks and get pretty large. Some of their bases are as big as a nickle. The straight part of the snail's shell, which looks like an elephant nose, is fatter than cooked spaghetti (about the size of airline tubing). I don't know if their mucus strands irritate my corals, but they sure look ugly. I plug up their opening with epoxy putty. I used to have a smaller, more standard size vermitid snails in my 15, but these did not annoy anybody.

Dr. Ron Shimek wrote "If vermetids become abundant in a reef tank, the copious production of mucus strands may irritate some corals. Generally, however, they are harmless." I remember Lori complaining about her acropora was irritated and always had polyps pulled in on one side because of the mucus strands.

 

[markkazdad]

Ah, I was going to offer it a home, perhaps with Tomoko's gorilla crab. There is a youtube video of one eating that is very cool. Let me know if you get tired of the snot, though I managed to kill the xenia frag you gave me, so I can't make any promises.

 

[JSB]

Mark,

I'll give you another Xenia. Let me get one started growing onto something else. This is the same colony, by the way. You may get lucky and the snail come with it.

 

[markkazdad]

Cool! My best post-mortem guess is that either I topped off too much water at once, causing too much of a salinity change, or the cooler overnight temperatures were causing too large of a temperature swing. I have a 50W heater in the tank now.