Digitate hydroid debacle

[Steefer]

Warning ⚠️ long post

Rough night for a newbie reefer here. I posted the picture of the frag on Facebook about 5 days ago concerned about the digitate hydroid (didn’t know what it was at the time) on my first ever Coral frag. I did not dip the Coral before placing it in my tank. About a day after learning that is was a Digitate Hydroid and that there was also green bubble algae growing on the plug, I decided to pick up some Bayer, pop the bubble algae off, and dip the coral. I thought that did the trick. Spoiler alert, I WAS WRONG! Shocking, I know. Things went well for the next two days so I cut the plug and glued it to my live rock. That was this past Saturday. Tonight, I noticed two Digitate hydroids poking out the second my lights dimmed on the timer. Multiple of my Zoa polyps were closed up and I know it was from the hydroids because the zoa looked GREAT just before the lights dimmed. I reached in to pluck them with no luck. In the process I caused more Zoa heads to close up and noticed yet again, green bubble algae. I ultimately made the decision to pop off the plug and ditch the coral all together. I feel terrible as it is a living creature but I don’t want either of the pests at large in my tank if I can do something to avoid it. The frag was only $9 and in hindsight, I now realize that the amount of green algae growing on the coral plug itself was an astonishing amount which’s leads me to believe it sat at my LFS for a LONG time (you can see this in the photos.) When I popped off the plug I noticed this red stuff growing between where it was glued and the glue that was still on my rock. Any ideas what that is? Do you think I made the right decision?

[Garf]

If it was 9$, you'd spend as much on a coral dip. Cut your loss and toss, if they were a common variety. Otherwise you could try and save the zoas, dip in a hydrogen peroxide solution, that should take care of the algae. The red stuff doesn't look like anything awful. In the future, remove them from the frag plugs and dip. You can mount them on new plugs, or if you know where you will be placing them and where they will be happy, just glue them on the rock. I will often glue onto a new plug, place them, and if the corals and you are happy in a couple weeks, pop them off the plug and place. It helps to do this in a bunch. Zoas I dont mess with anymore, I will just do a thorough cleaning of the plug they came on, even if the plug looks ugly, it will soon be covered. 

 

I wouldn't worry about digit hydroids. They should come and go, may take time. Try and manually remove if they are bothering any corals. I have several and they don't seem to bother my LPS corals. I have only a couple small zoa frags