Guys... I think I have a worm problem.
 

Fed my fish kinda late tonight. A chunk of formula one that my cowfish didn't eat stayed on the sand as the lights went out. !5 minutes after lights out.... and this:

http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...psb77dde62.jpg

Imma build me a worm trap. Some people harvest macro algae for nutrient export, I'm gonna harvest some worms.

Wow. That has the be the most bristle worms iv ever seen! That is unreal! My wrasses would have a hay day! keep us updated!

A nightmare in the making......

my roommates think they're gross, but they've never bothered me. My copper band doesn't like grabbing food from the water column (prefers to pick it from the rocks), and my cowfish moves like a semi-trailer reversing in to an under-sized loading dock, so I suspect they've reached such densities because I have to turn my return pump off and my vortech's waaaaaaay down when I feed and a good proportion of the food sinks to the bottom. The slow poke's spend the next 7 minutes picking it off, but those worms are surprisingly fast.

However, I didn't realize there were THAT many in there.

Anyone have a good DIY worm trap idea?

What kind of wrasse do you have that eats bristle worms specifically? If I could turn those guys in to a fat wrasse rather than something for Calgary water treatment plant to deal with I'd feel way less guilty.

I have had good success using the nylon sock with fresh seafood(oysters, clam meat and uncooked shrimp)placed inside the sock. However with that being said I use fine mesh nylons as I found nylons with thick mesh the worms cereal all over and don't stick that good with the fine mesh their bristles stick quite well

I have tried traps but get varying degrees of success for me fine mesh nylons worked the best

My Melanarus wrasse loves bristle worms. Iv seen him eat a few right in front of me. He's a beast. Eats anything that moves lol.

good idea! I just cut up a fine nylon filter sock that didn't fit (d'oh!) and put some food in it. We'll see how many are inside it by the time I got to bed!

I've always wanted one of those... I wonder if it would get along with my richmond's wrasse? I need to reduce the population a bit before I add to it though

My Melanarus is super friendly. My only other wrasse is a corris, but he doesn't bug any of my fish, not even my borb. Even my corris chases my borb once n awhile. And my Melanarus is double the size. When I put my hand in the tank he is always right there looking for food I might happen to stir up. He even lets me pet him. An awesome fish for sure.

6 line eats them like crazy but will be a nightmare if you ever wanna add a wrasse again after. I also found that whenever i do a flatworm exit treatment i am sucking up 40-50 bristle worms as they seem to die too. But with a population that big you might wanna catch some first in case they die inside the rockwork and cause a big nutrient spike.

Interceptor also kills them along with flat worms and acro eating flat worms. Just dosed my tank with it, and it has never looked better.

I don't want to kill them outright, but I do want to reduce their numbers. I just pulled the filter sock:

http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...pse7c04ee7.jpg

If I do that every night for a couple of weeks I *should* make a dent in their population

Yup definitely the stuff nightmares are made of.....

Nitrates
 

And that is why without the bio pellets your nitrates go up so quickly.

Need to be over feeding like mad to get that kinda population.

I agree...YIKES!!!

OMG hahaha thats nasty! Talk about a creepy night shot.

But definitely go for a melanurus. I absolutely loved mine. He was super friendly with my other wrasses, and ate the crap out of bristles. They have killer coloring too.

I'm gonna be looking closely at just how much food the worms are eating vs the fish today, or at least looking in to foods that don't sink straight to bottom when the pumps are off. I barely had any bristle worms in my old 90 gallon, but I left all the pumps running when I fed that tank, so nothing ever sat on the bottom long enough for them to grab it. I've always followed the 2 min rule, but upped it to the 5 min rule (only feed as much as your fish can eat in 2 or 5 min) when I got fish that were slow eaters and preferred to pick off rocks. However, I'm starting to think that the reason there's no more food left in the tank after 5 min is because these guys are eating it! If it's not getting to my fish anyway, it's wasted money.

I think you found why your corals are dying!!!!

That many worms need to eat!!!!

Including coral....

I really don't think so. At least not from predation. I watch my tank at night a lot, those worms never go near corals. They don't so much as crawl on their bases, let alone crawl all the way to their tips and start eating them. I've never seen a single worm on a single coral, and I'm often working next to the tank until 3 in the morning. You barely even see them at night unless there's a piece of uneaten leftover food on the sand to draw them out.

It's entirely possible that something killed a bunch of them, and that's where the ammonia spike came from though.

I think I have a good trap idea. I'm going to bury the lid of a red sea nitrate test kit in the sand, and build up the sand around it so that worms can crawl. I'll drop a couple of cubes of food in after lights out, and once a large enough writhing mass of worms has crawled in to it, I'll put the bottom half of the kit on and lift it out.