So my microscope was waiting for me when I got home!
1. My roomate and her boyfriend did a spectacular job with my tank. The corals grew more in the 17 days they were taking care of it then in the past 2 months!
2. The brown slime is significantly reduced, but it's not gone. By 3:30 today (right now basically), there's a light dusting on the rocks that had it worst.
3. Only one coral seems like it's being damaged by the slime, but it was never really doing that well to begin with. ANd when I say slime, I really mean a super fine dusting that you have to look closely to notice.
Anyway, I grabbed some of the brown slime and took a picture with my microscope's camera. Forgive the teeny tiny file, the driver that came with the camera won't work, so I had to get a freeware version and I have no idea how to work it yet:
Thing is, they move. A lot. These things that form these brown sticky mats are in fact million and millions of tiny watermelon seed shaped swimming cells. that pic is at 10X mag, but at 40X you can actually see the little skirt of... something. It looks like a skirt of cilia as they go all the way around them. Does anyone know if these are in fact dinos? I took a short video too, I'll try and figure out how to upload it in a bit