Just a quick question please.
Is the stuff growing around my moss ball part of it or is it algae that I need to get rid of?
There are a few shrimp foraging in there along with some babies.
Not sure if it's something I should keep if the shrimp like it
Or if I should clean up.
Thank you
The main growth in the picture does not seem to be a moss ball but a wad of Mustafa's macroalge (though an actual moss ball seems to be to the left of the pic), and that is indeed a normal way for it to grow, the center is just a dense tangle of those strands. Mine spread for a while before bunching up enough that the oxygen it generated caused it to float to the surface. I later moved it out of the center of the tank's lighting to minimize its growth.
To me it looks like you have some species of hair/string algae growing around the mossball. It will probably get thicker over time and shrimp may get stuck in it. If you want to remove it I'd just take out the mossball with the hair algae around it and pull the hair algae off. Then put the mossball back in. You could theoretically keep a tiny bit of the hair algae around if you really like it, but you have to stay on top of so it doesn't get too dense. I prefer and recommend the supershrimp macroalgae instead for a similar purpose.
