Brittle fan like things

[dholowiski]

These are growing on one of my rocks in several places. They don't move around at all but I know they are growing because there was only one when I got the rock and now there are several.

I don't know if you can see it in the picture but it looks like on the end it is kind of fuzzy. They seem to break fairly easy, the oldest group of them is all broken from a snail running into them.

[fungia]

That's Padina sp., a brown macroalgae.

 

Brown algaes usually show up early in the development of reef tanks and don't last very long. Just a natural part of the algae succession. One of the best features of a nano-tank is that you can actually NOTICE these things! In a big tank, you'd never see them.