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

[Slyguy00]

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.

[asylumdown]

Originally Posted by Slyguy00

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:



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

[Dearth]

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

[Nate]

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.

[mseepman]

Originally Posted by Dearth

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

I agree...YIKES!!!

[FishyFishy!]

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.

[asylumdown]

Originally Posted by Nate

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'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.

[hfp75]

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

That many worms need to eat!!!!

Including coral....

[asylumdown]

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.