white sponges I found in my tank

[reefstarter]

My long tenacle anemone moved himself more to the front of the tank exposing a cave in rock work . I look every night for "the happening of the night " and spotted one then another today . I believe they are a good thing acting as filters . They are white about an inch and half or so diameter . I noticed some smaller ones in my sump in basement and was wondering about them . My only concern is they may make my water too clean . my acans stay closed for past month or so . I am wondering if they have something to do with it . I've tried different placements less and more flow . reducing lighting . just doesn't seem to help . My acros are doing great though lol . How can I make the water more dirty ? without causing other issues ? Everything else in the tank looks great . any feedback on this ?

 

[MofoCorals]

The sponges are a good thing. I have them all over my 180 reef and are nothing to worry about. My acans do not do well either in my display and I'm not sure why. Try feeding them at night time. Feeding does help them grow and plump up from time to time.

 

[reefstarter]

ks , maybe I'll take the cheato out of sump and see what that does

 

[this is me]

If you wish to make your water dirty, it's really easy to do. But I really don't think you want to do that.
How do you know your water is too clean? What are your parameters(PH, temps, salinity, ALK, CA, MG, NH3, PO4,etc)?
IME, SPS can tolerate higher temperature(80+) and higher ALK(10dKH+) than LPS especially acan. Again, I cannot recommend anything specific if you don't state your tank parameters.

 

[reefstarter]

Understood all hovers between 8 & 9 calc about 440 mag around 1400 temp 77 salinity 1.025 I'll check nitrates and phosphates tonight when I get home

 

[reefstarter]

so I just checked my params across the board on the 90 . calcium is 450 , alk may be a bit high at 9.5 phos. .08 nitrates 0 mag at 1450 . might try to get the alk down to 8.5 ish and see if that helps . By the way found at least 4 more good sized sponges in there . some are pinaple shaped others kind of like a "string" kind of hard to describe in text .

 

[wpeterson]

The sponges are a great thing for the tank and a good sign of water quality.

Have you checked for fish or invertebrates picking at your acans? I had trouble with shrimp and crabs harassing my acans, picking at them enough that they receded or outright eating them. Once I moved them to our new LPS friendly tank without any harassment, they opened up and flourished. The shrimps and crabs knew enough to only do it at night, but I eventually caught them.

 

[reefstarter]

So I checked my acans closely , found an asteria star on one , so I removed it placed that one in another tank to see what happens . Also been reading up on sponges . what they "eat" and what could happen if suddenly they don't have food . Apparently they use silicates to form thier skeletons . so that means I have silicates in the water column . which explains why I get the ocassional small outbreak of Cyno . Hoping that leaving these sponges in the tank for some time reduces these and with removing some at one point will export the from my system . I also found another decent sized one between my baffle in my sump . . One other thing I want to watch for is them growing in the drains . that also could explain why my drains have been getting noisy lately . might be time for a roto rooter job lolthey sell plastic pipe cleaners that have varying lenghts you can use for this . instead of cutting out the plumbing and tossing it . also might get me a harlequin shrimp to cull the heard of astria stars a bit .