Well after talking with Anthony Calfo last weeekend I had come to the conclusion that I needed to tear down the entire reef before my small population of about 8 patches of Hyroid worms started taking over the SPS corals. I also sent Charles Delbeek a second opinion email regarding Hydroids and his reply was the same as Anthony's-Manualremoval
Charles also said there are a few variety's of Nudi's that eat hydroids but he said getting the specfic one shipped in would be like finding a needle in a haystack.
I thought it would be best to eradicate them before they got a serious foothold on more area's of my live rock. So at 10am this morning I started a full rip down of my entire reef. I had a spare 15gl (with heater and airstone) which I used to house all my corals and fish, then all the LR went into 5 different buckets depending on size and color. After all the rock was out I then had to cherry pick all the snails and crabs from the sandbed, after that I decided that I was going to reduce my sandbed from 2" down to 1". I used a small tupperware container to then scoop out about 10lbs of LS. Since there was nothing left except 1" of sand and a few more inches of water I decided to give the new sandbed a thorough clean by rinsing it and then quickly sipohoning out the dirty water.
I then began the teedious job of inspecting all the LR piece by piece with a a small screwdriver in hand. Before each piece was placed back into the tank I removed any patches of hydroids, button polyps, and algae. After about 2 hrs of carfully removing these tiny pests I was ready to rebuild the reef. After all the rock was in place, I started to glue new and old corals back onto my live rock, paying close attention to turkey baste any corals that were exposed to the air, as I only had 6" of water in the tank. After everything was glued or fitted back in place it was time to bring up the water level with 3 pails of water before I could begin to add the fish and inverts. I then let everything settle down before making some final adjustments for the night. Here are a few pics of the day, and the paper towel that I used for the nasty's was covered completly by the time I was done.
Moral of this story: never asume anything, a year ago I thought these nasty little worms were just a small variety of feather dusters-if I had only done the research that day
I did however get to aquascape for more flow which allowed me to add a second MX1200, so now my fish can all go whitewater rafting
