Algae ID

[beam3er]

Hello,
I was wondering if anyone could help me ID this algae. I bought a piece of live rock a few months ago from my LFS. (who I recently found out is a jerk liar and only cares about making a buck) When I bought the LR this algae was barely present and the LFS told me it was some type of macro algae and is beneficial. I do not trust him, and it is growing like crazy! I want to know if I should kill it or keep it. I took three pictures, they are not the greatest quality, since I took them with my Nintendo Dsi. Thank you all in advance for any input or comments.
Steven

 

[beam3er]

Hello,
I was wondering if anyone could help me ID this algae. I bought a piece of live rock a few months ago from my LFS. (who I recently found out is a jerk liar and only cares about making a buck) When I bought the LR this algae was barely present and the LFS told me it was some type of macro algae and is beneficial. I do not trust him, and it is growing like crazy! I want to know if I should kill it or keep it. I took three pictures, they are not the greatest quality, since I took them with my Nintendo Dsi. Thank you all in advance for any input or comments.
Steven

 

[yote]

The best I can tell,it kinda looks like feather caulerpa to me.
If you had a bigger tank,Id say get either a tang or rabbit fish.But since your sig says its in a 29 gallon,I'd just remove as much as possible by hand.

 

[yote]

Looks like it could be feather caulerpa to me.
Typically,I'd say a tang or rabbitfish would take care of it.But in a 29,you best bet is manual removal.

 

[Picasso]

Hard to tell from the photos, I've got a feather caulerpa that I paid good money for. My caulerpa is a "crawling" grass and it's extremely easy to remove so I can keep it in one spot. Yours looks like it's very tight growing so it might be something else?

Catherine

 

[Bifferwine]

Hard to tell exactly what type it is from the blurry pics, but I can say for sure that you don't want it anywhere near your corals. It will smother them out, overtake them, and kill them. Like Yote said, pull off as much by hand as possible. If it's on a small rock with no corals on it, you are probably better off boiling the rock, or letting it dry out in the sun for a while. If you do prune it by hand, a Mexican turbo snail should help take care of whatever is leftover.

 

[beam3er]

Thanks, my brother is going to let me borrow his camera so I can post better pics soon. I am going to trim it down as much as possible and see if the snail take care of the rest. Thank you all once again.

 

[R Cubed]

The new pics sould help us. Till then if you do any of the things reccomended by the others you should be fine.
Ryan

 

[dcantucson]

When in doubt, pull it out!

 

[beam3er]

I did pull it out. Got as much off of the rock as I could. I will keep an eye on it and not let the algea get out of hand. Thanks

 

[Melosu58]

The good news is that it will help to get rid of excessive nutrients like nitrates and phosphates. The LFS was right about that. The bad news is that it will over run your tank. The LFS was wrong about that. Calerpa is best kept in a refugium under 24/7 lighting and regularly pruned. For now just hand prune it.