Please ID these things in my sump...

[LucaDash]

Can anyone tell me what the hell these things in my sump are??

They are attached to my walls...

Pics attached.

Please help!

[Rhygar666]

harmless, sponges or some kind of barnacles if that is the right english word.

[BlackTip]

They look like pineapple sponges. They are growing in my sump, and there are few in my DT.

[LucaDash]

Does anyone know how they got there and/or how to prevent them??
They seem harmless enough, it's just a PITA to clean out my sump...lol
I was thinking maybe they were food particles that grew fuzz around them.

[Sugar Magnolia]

It's common for them to grow in lowlight environments, nothing to worry about. They're just harmless little filter feeders.

[LucaDash]

Does anything eat them?

[Jade5051]

Does anything eat them?

There is always something that eats something. :)

[billdogg]

I'm with Sugar on this one. Leave them be. Their population will wax and wane as their food supply changes. Harmless and beneficial filter feeders.

[homer1475]

Pineapple sponges, harmless filter feeders. You usually see an explosion of them in a new tank, or a tank that has excess nutrients.

When my tank was new, up until it was roughly 8 months old, I had a new growth of these every week even though I was scraping them out with my weekly WC's. Once my tank matured, they virtually disappeared(I still have some in my sump section, but no where near the population I used to have).