ID needed - what is this?
 

Hello,

I am cycling my new tank and I noticed these spots on this piece of dead coral. Can someone tell me what they think these red spots are? When I first put all of this live rock in, it came with a few pieces of dead coral like this one. I am sure it didn't have those spots on it. Any help would be appreciated, whether it be good news or bad!

http://i41.photobucket.com/albums/e2...k/DSC_8167.jpg

Looks like little sponges but could be wrong. I have seen these on some of my live rock when the tank was new too.

All safe :)

could also be foraminiferans, also good :)

Both very plausible IDs, also possibly coraline algae. Any way to take a closer photo?

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Apparently I am the worst photographer in the history of aquaculture. My crappy old Nikon and I were only able to zoom in a bit further, so all I could really do was go to manual focus and then crop the photo. Here is my attempt to make this more visible:

http://i41.photobucket.com/albums/e2...nk/reddots.jpg

I lied, that zoomed photo confuses me more :razz:.

Nothing to worry about though, all natural in a reef tank and its not going to hurt anything.

Awesome, thanks for the peace of mind!

They are small tube worms , i have them in my display . When they die the shells stay that color forever and are very hard so they stay on stuf for a long time . Those are probably dead ones .

Oh, ok. Some of the spots are getting larger every day so I was curious. I have some feather duster worms that seem to have magically appeared as well. Considering this "live" rock was left outside in buckets in Calgary from May until October I am pretty impressed that anything is alive at all.

They are vermatid snails and I would get rid of them ASAP they will become a plague over time. I have you fed the tank yet? They will send a mucous net to catch any food or debris.

I will pull that piece out and ditch the red spots then.

Here is the little guy I think is a small feather duster:

http://i41.photobucket.com/albums/e2...therduster.jpg

Now that I looked at it again I may have seen something that wasn't there. Is there a hard tube sticking up out of the middle?

I have vermatid snails and they are always trying to catch things with little strands of white lines hahah

kind like a fishing line :P

One of the red spots has a tube out of it, the rest don't. The tube looks like all the hundreds of ones that are on my live rocks though. Much smaller than the tube on that worm I have, and the tubes look almost like they are made of glass!

Since that piece of Coral is loose I'll move it closer to the glass so I can take a better photo. It's a good 10" from the front of the tank right now which makes it hard for me to photograph.