Faint green ring above water in fermentation lock, infection?

Hey everyone,

I hope someone may be able to help me on this, as I haven't seen anything like it before. I tried my own version of a vanilla porter recipe and I was clean throughout the process (besides not sterilizing my vanilla beans). Perhaps I should have?

After 2 weeks in secondary, a faint green ring has appeared above the water in the fermentation lock. It looks like a tiny bug crawled in and died. I can see small black specks in the flocculated yeast, but I am curious if it might be the crystals I scraped out of the vanilla beans. I took off the plug and the beer smelled fine. I have some photos on my flickr site here, if anyone has an idea, please have a look and I would appreciate hearing your opinions.

Thanks,
Ben

I'm not worried about the stuff in the airlock (but try to use starsan or cheap vodka in the future just to make sure)

It is a little strange that you are getting that much gunk on top in secondary. How long was it in primary? What the gravity reading when you transferred? I'm not an experiment on infections by any means, so maybe somebody else will take a look at it.

I had it in primary for ~12 days. I can't find my notes for this batch unfortunately. I will post if I find them.

Algae or fungus. Cheap vodka as the airlock liquid should fix the problem. Just my 2 cents.