I think I have one of those POS rear mounted light moving pictures of this exact picture.
The ones in the pic are Christmas Tree Worms. There are larger ones, in what looks like a paper tube, called Giant Feather Dusters (usually brown / tan striped, not as colorful) but like 10x the size. There’s also cluster dusters which are 1/4 the size and look like a carpet. All will retract when they feel threatened (its the feeding parts of a worm you see). Its not really stressful as they do it naturally hundreds, if not thousands of times a day anyway. if you did it ALL day for a few weeks it would be an issue. but nobodys THAT bored. Larger tanks / systems were WAY more stable… I had 1400gallons… 15 gallons of evaporation on that and I barely saw salinity swings, 15g of evaporation on a 20g tank and you have the dead sea. Volume = Stability… I had many brain corals thrive and even spawn in my show reef. Even had a mated pair of Mandarin Gobies who spawned in there! For such a tiny fish, they need big tanks to MAKE their food for them (amphipods and copepods, they dont readily accept prepared foods)… 75g per fish on avg! a pair in my 300 was happy enough to do the no-no cha-cha for me 
lol
The cameras are, well, off the hook! I wanted to share the amazing sights of Palancar Reefs pinnacles, swim thrus and caverns to my non diving friends, and a go-pro 4 on a 4k tv didn’t do it justice. I jumped into spherical video, and the challenges of doing it underwater (optics change, FOV changes, refraction screws with you), and then stitching those together! Going thru Customs is always a nailbiter, Mexico likes to shake you down for “more than 2 cameras”. and the tariffs can add up with 9 cameras. I like to put them all together in my biggest rig and say “see, here, look, its ONE camera system. they all fit together like a puzzle and work together”. Trust me, showing spherical video on your phone, of the reefs just a half mile away from you, to a customs agent who’s never left the island, is kinda like bringing fire TO the island for the first time. ROFL. Its actually spherical video and the need to design my own multi camera mounting rig that I got into 3D printing!
Sorry to hear of your friend. She must have been a smart one, because SW tanks aren’t easy to keep, thats for sure! Glad you have that memory of her tanks and the tube worms LOL
That would be entirely possible, and some absolutely NEXT LEVEL shit! Damn that would be insane.
Around here you could rent that out as a shitty apartment for $500 a month
Who needs sandbags when you can build a banana bunker?!
We had one of those when I had a saltwater tank. We had a pretty sweet setup: 100 gallon long tank on a stand with a 30 gallon refugium below containing a deep layer of live sand. We had some cool pieces of live rock and interesting fish, but lost everything when an ice storm knocked out power for a week. We couldn’t afford to replace the contents so it became a freshwater planted tank.
Mandarin Goby (Internet pic, not mine)
There’s some pretty amazing things in the ocean…first time I saw one of these (at an aquarium) i thought it was fake
