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Originally Posted by smeese
spreads to your main display from your fuge basically without you putting it there
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Actually, I have never seen gamete production in Caulerpa result in successful reproduction in an aquarium situation....I have never seen new, young Caulerpa cropping up in new places after gamete release.
"Going sexual" refers to the situation where the Caulerpa releases gametes (sperm and eggs) into the water. An individual Caulerpa individual (even a 3 foot long, one foot high C. paspaloides) is technically one single cell with no partitions inside like in you and me. They cytoplasm is continuous from one tip of the organism to the other. This is pretty wild and crazy, and very very cool. The cytoplasm is multi-nucleated though, so really, in some respects, it is lots and lots of cells that are all fused together with no partitions around the individual cells, but without those partitions we really need to call the whole Caulerpa individual one very complex multinucleated cell.
This changes though when time for sexual reproduction comes. At that time, a Caulerpa (as well as a number of other
marine algae that operate more or less the same way) partitions its contents into individual cells, which differentiate into gametes (which presumably can swim, though I have never seen them first hand under a microscope nor have I seen diagrams of them, so I'm not certain). The Caulerpa then develops little tubes sticking out all over its surface, and it squirts out its former-cytoplasm-now-transformed-into-gametes into the water. When a large Caulerpa does this in an aquarium, or a lot of smaller ones do this at once, the tank water can be very cloudy with gametes for a whole morning. I have never seen any bad consequences to my tanks as a result of this, except that the formerly green, lush Caulerpa is now a hollow, translucent, whitish, dead husk of what it was. It has put its all into sexual reproduction, converted everything alive from its interior into gametes, and dumped it all into the water. Unless some of those gametes are successful (which as I said, I have never seen happen in an aquarium, which is probably a good thing, otherwise it would be cropping up everywhere), then you have lost that Caulerpa.
I don't have a clear understanding of the triggers for sexual reproduction. Keeping the individuals small through frequent trimming has been suggested as a way to prevent this from happening (this could be, since every time I have had C. paspaloides get really really big it has gone sexual and I have lost it from my tanks), though physical trauma sometimes seems to trigger sexual reproduction.
Anyway, this lack of stability of Caulerpa growths is one of the reasons why people sometimes don't like to use Caulerpa in refugiums for nutrient uptake. Some species are MUCH more likely to do this in an aquarium setting than others though, and as I said in my previous post, some are very very stable and normally stay in a vegetive state (and these tend to be the only ones that last in my systems long-term for very many years).
As you can see, the marine algae are very very strange and wonderful organisms (and I haven't even told you about the
red algae....these do not operate like Caulerpa, but they are so very strange in terms of how they reproduce that some biologists have suggested they should be put in their own separate kingdom!)
