ID please

The friendliest place on the web for anyone with an interest in aquariums or fish keeping!
If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.

furrymurray

Aquarium Advice Freak
Joined
May 12, 2011
Messages
277
Does anyone know what this is? It has slowly grown to about this size of a pencil erasure. It looks like maybe some type of mushroom but I am not sure?! Thanks in advance

image-2071232161.jpg
 
I had to really zoom in because its pretty small. I think it may be a mushroom or maybe an anemone because it looks like it has some tentacles.
 
Definitely looks more like a mushroom than an anemone. It's hard to tell from the picture, but it almost looks like a small fungia or plate coral. Is it soft?
 
Sorry I just got home from being out of town. I touched it with long tweezers and it is soft and also retracted pretty quickly. Much faster than a mushroom would. Probably shrunk to about half its size in a second or two So now I wonder if it is a mushroom?!?!
 
Are you talking about the large green animal in the enter of the picture or the smaller purplish object to the lower right of it?
 
The large green thing. The picture is really enlarged. The actual size is about the size of a pencil erasure. It has a very soft body and can shrink very quickly
 
Is it attached? It really looks like a small Fungia plate coral. They have a stony skeleton underneath, but their normal state is very inflated. They can deflate very, very quickly. It's hard to see in the picture, but the mouth on a Fungia is usually a straight line rather than round.

It definitely doesn't look like a Duncan. Duncan's have a flat oral disk with a ring of tentacles around the edge.

Some mushrooms can have those distinctive ridges with the short pseudo-tentacles. Some mushrooms are also faster than others to react to stimuli. There is even one mushroom that eats fish. So the speed of retraction does not totally rule out that possibility.
 
It does look like a fungia but its attached to some branching type live rock with no noticable skeleton. Oh and i have an elephant ear mushroom that is about 11 inches across that did eat a large female clown. It didnt fully digest it though. The clown hosted it for over a year before it happened
 
I'm stumped. Does it eat? When it retracts does it appear to have a skeleton? Does it fold up like an anemone or does it just go flat? I've been wracking my brain trying to figure out what this might be.
 
When it shrinks up i dont see any skeleton. I havent seen it fold up like an anemone just deflate and shrink to about half ts size real quickly
 
Here is another picture with a flash light shining out it

image-1324974169.jpg
 

Attachments

  • image-3161161299.jpg
    image-3161161299.jpg
    129.3 KB · Views: 83
Just goes to show that even two decades of experience doesn't mean I've seen it all.
 
I really like it and think its real pretty and hope I am giving it the care it needs. Thanks for helping though :)
 
If it is staying inflated and growing then chances are that it is getting what it needs. It may become more clear what it is are it gets bigger.
 
Is it attached? It really looks like a small Fungia plate coral. They have a stony skeleton underneath, but their normal state is very inflated. They can deflate very, very quickly. It's hard to see in the picture, but the mouth on a Fungia is usually a straight line rather than round.

It definitely doesn't look like a Duncan. Duncan's have a flat oral disk with a ring of tentacles around the edge.

Some mushrooms can have those distinctive ridges with the short pseudo-tentacles. Some mushrooms are also faster than others to react to stimuli. There is even one mushroom that eats fish. So the speed of retraction does not totally rule out that possibility.

I kno what a Duncan looks like I happen to have a Duncan in my tank which happens to be the same color and that photo is hard to see but looks like it has tenticles IMO it was a suggestion I never said that it was exactly a Duncan but it would be pretty sweet if it was
 
Back
Top Bottom