Halp! Rainbow Monti frag turning white, small algae tufts

[bzb]

Got this tiny rainbow monti frag at the meeting @ Coral Shop. It's been growing alright and coloring up pretty well. Last week, starting noticing small white spots on it, and over the last couple days, the spots have grown and look to be getting fuzzy with some sort of algae. I blew it off with a pipette but not sure what else to do here.

The parts that have encrusted look fine, it's just the original frag piece that looks like it had a couple spots maybe die off? Hoping this isn't something worse... thoughts?

The frag is pretty small, maybe 1/2" across. Difficult to get a good pic of what's going on. I'll play around with the DSLR tonight to see if I can get a focused photo.

 

[ZapataInc]

Yeah really can't tell what's going on. But I will say that I've seen what you described happen to one of my montis. It eventually went away. Not 100% sure that what is happening to yours is the same thing.

 

[jcook54]

I can't make out much from the pic and I hate that I'm always a worst-case-scenario kinda guy but have you considered monti nudis? I'm sure you have but when I had them, I would get white spots and when the nudis were on top of the frag, they kinda look like little white puffs.

 

[Adam]

At first I was thinking detritus since it blew off.

Just make sure it's not what Justin said. If so it needs to go in QT and months of dipping. And hope you don't have any other month's.

Pics for reference.

monti eating nudibranch - Google Suche

www.google.com

 

[bzb]

I thought the same thing, but haven't noticed those signs. Not white puffs thankfully - the puffs are green. Looks like the start of hair algae, sort of.

Tank photography is difficult!! This was shot with 24-105mm f/4 ISO 100 with 100% whites on. Zoomed way in on a 50MP JPG. Can kind of make out the green tufts?

 

[bzb]

Here's the original photo (had to scale down to upload).

The frag is fingernail sized, but it's almost double what it was with the encrusting bits. I'm not noticing any white areas nor the algae growth on the parts that have encrusted the rock.

 

[jcook54]

To me the it looks like a lot of the lighter colored areas are regular, healthy base with the polyps retracted back. Is is possible there was a small dead spot and the algae has been irritating the polyps and keeping them closed. I had something similar happen with a vermetid snail and the base was a similar color. At a glance it looked like there was a white spot but really it was healthy base with polyps retracted. Either way, no signs of nudibranch damage at all.

 

[ZapataInc]

I thought the same thing, but haven't noticed those signs. Not white puffs thankfully - the puffs are green. Looks like the start of hair algae, sort of.

Tank photography is difficult!! This was shot with 24-105mm f/4 ISO 100 with 100% whites on. Zoomed way in on a 50MP JPG. Can kind of make out the green tufts?

View attachment 18187

So i have a bubble gum digi that that is happening to. When i had my Dino outbreak the digi took a good bit of damage and the polyps were retracted for a long time. With the dinos beat the digi hasnt had a chance to bounce back because there does seem to be some sort of algae that took hold of the spots that the Dinos were on. @jcook54 saw it this past weekend when he came to do a PAR reading for me.

 

[bzb]

So let it ride, or scrub off the algae? Or strategically place a couple hermits?

 

[ZapataInc]

So let it ride, or scrub off the algae? Or strategically place a couple hermits?

Im letting it ride for right now...Hoping that it can bounce back.

 

[jcook54]

I would do what you can to get the algae off but when it's really close like that, it almost requires a micro-surgery to accomplish anything without damaging the base. Try placing hermits, I do, but it isn't typically very effective. On the plus side, a lot of the light color I see matches the light purple/blue of the base so it's not skeleton.

 

[snowmansnow]

Any nudis around ?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[bzb]

Not that I've noticed. I'm guessing even if I did, my Copperband eats pretty much anything that moves. He's destroyed my pod population, along with every aiptasia in the tank.

 

[snowmansnow]

Not that I've noticed. I'm guessing even if I did, my Copperband eats pretty much anything that moves. He's destroyed my pod population, along with every aiptasia in the tank.

Just a thought