Anemone/coral Id Please!

[ech0o]

I believe they are some sort of bubble tip anemone resting on top of some sort of soft coral.   I was sold 2 of these rocks for $10 at PETCO, as well a larger rock without the coral but covered in feather dusters, VERY NICE!!!  

 
Anyways what is the coral, and what are the small anemone/corals sprouting up?  
 

 

[betta fish]

It's a colony of green star polyps on that rock, I can see 3 polyps, the purple mat is what they sprout from, you should have many more sprouting as the mat covers the whole rock but it is not very happy due to the covering of hair algae on top which may eventually smother and kill it, I would try to remove as much of the algae from the mat as possible using jets of water from a turkey baster or gentle strokes from a toothbrush until you see a clean purple mat then leave it be, green stars often sulk for some time when messed with.

 

[ech0o]

Oh wow so they are in fact one in the same lifeform, and those are just extensions of the main "mat".   This is indeed very neat!  Thank you for the advice the with algae, I was seeing if Benny bi-color blenny would work his magic but it seems he only likes to mow the rock he perches on, GET TO WORK DUDE!!!   
 
Going to remove all of that algae today for sure, and get those corals showing real nice, our HO led fixture is coming in the mail today, everything in the tank will be so excited to not be light starved anymore!

 

[Donya]

 I was seeing if Benny bi-color blenny would work his magic but it seems he only likes to mow the rock he perches on

 
Some blennies seem to have bigger appetites than others. In the other extreme, I used to have a lawnmower blenny that bulled everything else out of food and eventually got a blubbery walrus look going on; most in the species don't look like that but there was not one spot of algae in the tank lol. If you have an unenthusiastic grazer, you could try putting in a decent sized snail or two to help if the GHA spreads. Periodic manual removal alone is usually only a temporary solution for things like GHA and so usually needs to be paired with both sufficient grazing and boosting nutrient export elsewhere in the system.

 

[ech0o]

 Like I said, we got the rock from petco, they have ALOT of hair algae there, not so much an issue in our tank and i got a fair amount of it off earlier, i think in a few days they should start looking a lot better as there is already twice as many polyps since the cleaning.   Will post pictures tomorrow!!