 Starfish and algae
Hi
I recently discovered a little starfish on one of my live rocks. It is about the size of a nickle and beige in color. It has six legs and each leg has black dots that resemble the shape of a rectangle. There are also a few black dots on the center of it as well. Does anyone have a suggestion of what type starfish it might be and if known, how big I can expect it to grow?
My other question relates to the condition of my different forms of algae. I have several types but the one I'm concerned about is my pink coraline algae. It was growing on the same rock I have star polyps growing on. I noticed when looking over the tank last night that there was a piece of what appeared to be my bubble coral on the rock and on the star polys in particular. I used some tweezers to remove the clear bubble like object and that's when I noticed that the coraline flake style algae looked like it had been scorched. It's shriveled up looking. I am wondering it the bubble coral let loose one of it's bubbles for one reason or another and it damaged the polyps and algae, or if I have a low calcium count and the algae is unable to grow without a supplement. I have quite a few various algaes growing in this tank and some of them have started looking pale and chalky. I should mention that the only test kits I currently have are for ammonia, ph, nitrite and nitrate. The ammonia is at 10ppm the nitrite is "0", the nitrate is 10 and the ph is 8.4. I added a few more blue legged crabs to help control the brown algae bloom I just had and the bloom wasn't all that bad. I think part of the cause is that I have the tank in front of a partialy exposed southern window with miniblinds on it and the sun comes through the blinds shining down into the tank even though the blinds are fully closed. I wasn't considering this when I counted my hours of light limit and consequently had the tank exposed to more hours of light than I thought it was getting. I am now taking that into consideration. It only applies to days when the sun is out in the early afternoon which hasn't been often here. So do you think my problem with the shrivled algae is from it getting stung by the bubble coral eight inches away or do you think it sounds more like a low level of calcim or something else intirely? I appreciate any advice you can give.
Vickipansy | 
