fantastic stuff from LFS today

[eleodes]

i made a trip to a new area pet shop today and one of the employees is into seaweeds. he hooked me up with frags of a whole bunch of stuff. can you suggest species names for these three Caulerpa?







here's some more stuff:












he gave me several more seaweeds too. the flatworm and hydroids came as hitchhikers with the weeds. does anybody recognize the hydroid? they were extremely cool in the tank at the store; some of the hydroid jellyies were almost 1cm big. i wonder if it's safe to turn them loose in tank(?).

[Swanwillow]

I probably wouldn't turn the hydroids loose...

but I wish that my lfs was cool like that.

[Seahorsewisprer]

Wow! Those are cool pics! You can even see the bugs on the first pic!

Those droids on the last pic, in the middle, look kinda like light starved aiptasia. I wonder if peppermints would eat em?

And, if these are cousins to majano or tulip anenomes, you might want to eradicate them before you add them to your tank. Those suckers are frustrating once they get a grip on an environment. They can run amok!

I want to hear what the experts call these macros. I have one similar to the short, bladed stuff, and the red....

Again, great pics!

[Seahorsewisprer]

hey, i didn't load the last pic! Cool limpet!

[Samala]

As always, fantastic pictures.

First green resembles C. prolifera without mature blades. Do the blades stay that size throughout the whole rhizome? Was it under really high light at the shop? It might be a sort of dwarfed version of C. prolifera.. called C. parvifolia.

Second green looks like it falls into the Caulerpa peltata, C. nummularia field. I'm not sure if that serrated/frilly edge to the uprights is diagnostic for any species over another.

The brown looks like a Dictyota genus member though none in my books have those elongated points but maybe thats because of the magnification you've given us that the books lack. Is it really finely branched.. say 1-2mm branches or so? Is that snail really big? If its pretty fine it might fit into the D. linearis sp. Thats a big if.

The red is a mystery. There are several red 'grape' types that vary in size and clustered arrangement. The only suggestion tends to be Botryocladia. I have one variant of this myself, new from the LFS today. If I find anything closer I'll post more.

Cool finds by the way! I have finally trained one of the LFSs to set aside neat looking seaweeds for me. Only took a year.

>Sarah

[Telgian]

Wow!

I love picture seven.
The soon-to-be-medusa look similar to those I get fromcassiopea polyps that I have, but the polyps aren't colonial like yours.

[kmk2307]

Nice macro pics! Is that red flatworm photosynthetic? Any idea if that red flatworm is photosynthetic? The Caulerpa with cup shaped blades is C. nummularia. The Caulerpa with leaf-shaped blades might be C. brachypus though there seems to be some confusion over what is brachypus and what is prolifera in the literature. More pics of the Caulerpas might be helpful. Thanks for sharing, btw!

[eleodes]

thanks for looking at those Caulerpa. C. parvifolia sounds good for the first one--did you see that it has slightly serrated blade margins?

the second Caulerpa is pretty neat. it grew in big soft mats in the store in a couple of tanks with horses and pipefish. it blows about in the current in a pleasing way and the horses reclined on it like they were using a couch.

i have no idea about the biology of that flatworm. it looked to me just like the acoel flatworms that i have all over the place--except not transclucent and real small only a couple mm long and pigmented.

i shot about 150 pictures of that limpet to get that one cute image.

now the aquascaping in the tank is all screwed up because the sand is covered with little seaweed frags tied to little rocks with sewing thread.

[arconom]

What camera and lens did you shoot those pictures with. There incredible!

[graveyardworm]

The little anemone looking guy in the 5th pic is a pseudocorynactis mushroom very cool. Considered reef safe, I have a bunch of them they generally live in the dark places of you LR. The flatworm may be the dreaded red planaria hopefully you've QT'd all this stuff.

edit added: in the 7th pic not sure on the macro but there appears to be a couple aiptasia attached to it.

[eleodes]

i have zero aptitude for photography, but i use fancy equipment here at the lab--a digital camera and microscope that go with some pretty fancy software from Syncroscopy:

http://www.syncroscopy.com/syncrosco...ntageshort.asp

it does really well with stuff that is a little too small for macrophotography.

[pablum]

If the little fellar in pic 6 is a flatworm (don't know) then abandon ship.