moss balls ?

[CEEEYE]

I just purchased 2 moss balls of medium size.I was wondering if i could do something with them or if they just lay around as balls?I actually cut a small piece and attached it to a rock it looks nice but i dont know if that does any damage

[petluvr]

True moss balls pretty much just lie around as balls. Be careful cutting and snipping on them I did this and ended up with a HUGE outbreak of cladophora algae, which is what they really are, in my tank.

[CEEEYE]

thanks man im gonna remove the little pieces then

[FrostyNYC]

I don't believe that moss balls and the pest species of clado are the same thing. I've had pest clado, and it did not have the same growth habit as the "moss ball" type of clado. Who knows, though.

My moss ball is cut in half down the middle to create two little hills for my shrimp to crawl all over. I didnt really care for the unnatural look of a green ball in my tank, but it was a freebie with a plant purchase.

[fishorama]

I saw a tank with pieces of moss ball on branchy wood, very attractively done. Your rock sounds nice too

[angyles]

I cut mine apart and tied it onto some branches. IT's makes a gorgeous green carpet on them. It's slow growing, but has a very nice affect in the tank.

[angyles]

and I've never had algae from it. I've heard that it's a different kind of algae and that having an outbreak from it as a myth. really, if it was gonna make an outbreak, why wouldn't it do it regardless if you cut into it? It's just a hollow fuzzy mat. If you leave it a balll, it will form little baby balls on it that you can pull off and they eventually grow into bigger balls. This is how it propagates.

[angyles]

not to dwell on this, but I got curious again and did some searching. From wiki:

They were first discovered in the 1820s by Dr. Anton E. Sauter (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dr._Anton_E._Sauter&action=edit&redlink=1) in Lake Zeller (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeller_See) (de:Irrsee (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrsee)), Austria (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austria). The genus Aegagropila was established by Kützing (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=K%C3%BCtzing&action=edit&redlink=1) (1843) with A. linnaei as the type species based on its formation of spherical aggregations, but all the Aegagropila species were transferred to subgenus Aegagropila of genus Cladophora later by the same author (Kützing 1849). Subsequently, A. linnaei has been accommodated in the genus Cladophora in the Cladophorales and has been renamed Cladophora aegagropila (L.) Rabenhorst and Cl. sauteri (Nees ex Kütz.) Kütz. Extensive DNA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA) research in 2002 returned the name to Aegagropila linnaei. The presence of chitin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chitin) in the cell walls makes it distinct from the genus Cladophora.