Today I arrived home to find my glass covered with two forms of critters, both tiny. Half look like a white (colorless) dot with 8 or so radial legs, and the other form are elongated tubes that I first took for some sort of larvae. Most were stationary, but some (of both growth forms) were crawling along the glass surface, primarily in areas of
diatom growth. At first I thought some sort of pod, but several searches came up with nothing.
Following my last post, I did a search for mini-brittle stars, and I came upon a
WWM FAQ page about Hydrozoan Jellyfish. There on the page was a picture of legged critter, with a link to another
Shimek article with a few paragraphs about Staurocladia oahuensis! Gotta love the internet.
It seems as though Staurocladia oahuensis are generally not thought of as harmful, and they often appear in numbers and then disappear altogether. They reproduce by budding or by fission, and are often introduced into the aquarium in the polyp stage on
LR. Gotta love reef tanks.
I am not sure what the second (elongated) growth form is, whether it is larval or somehow related to the polyp stage.
