is this a crazy/dumb idea?

[jimnyo]

ok, so i'm having some problems: zoas won't open, corals overrun w/lice looking things (i think isopods), polyps are melting. strangely the gonipora flowerpots i have seem happy and they are supposed to be the fussiest things i've got. but they are not on the LR and the LR seems to be crawling w/amphipods and isopods and the latter really seem to be harrassing if not eating my corals.

i have a cookie jar pico that is 2 gallons. i do not want to pry off all my corals and dip them. i cannot have fish b/c of the bioload, not to mention, i'm not sure that would be kind to the fish b/c of the size of my tank, so i have no way to get a predator for the pods. i would like to find some way to dip the LR--all of it--w/o having to pull it out or pry corals off.

i do weekly 100% changes per brandon129 who has kept his gallon pico for over 7 years. could i dose the entire tank 20 minutes before a water change according to the directions on the bottle of lugol's as a dip and then suction everything out, or would there be too much residual lugol's left in the substrate, etc.?

[patback]

Don't feed. No food= no scavengers. Give it a few weeks and you'll be amphipod free.

[ndrobey]

Try a goby and/or a crab. Arrow crabs and red banded coral crabs have the reputation of eating pods. Tiger gobies and green banded gobies have been used successfully.

[jimnyo]

awwwww nuts, i just did my feeding last night in preparation for the wc, LOL. OK i'll try pulling everything out to dip (sigh...) and stop feeding for awhile.

oh shoot, but what about my snails? will they starve?

[.Newman.]

i think your problem is the goniopora coral. depending on how big it is, it can still produce sweepers that will kill everything around it. a 2gallon tank may not have enough open area for other corals to live around a goni. again, idk how large it is but it may be the problem here.

 

pods are certainly not your issue. they are just cleaning up damaged corals (ir. your zoas) bugs crawling around are isopods that are part of the normal HH CUC. they can be green, gray, brown, or whitish in color.

[sean1986]

Are you sure its the goniopora?.........iv had a few and so far they are not much for attacking. if anything ever touchs them or brushes against mine they retract so fast and don't stick to any corals.

[jimnyo]

i doubt it b/c the corals that disappeared/are having trouble are all the way on the other side of the tank and/or higher up and farther back on LR. the gonipora is on a small frag on the sand. so unless the sweepers are like 8" long and can selectively bypass everything else in the way between itself and the suffering corals, that's not it.

 

i have found many threads here and elsewhere that have people absolutely defending the fact that pods can eat corals.

[.Newman.]

common HH pods will eat or clean up sick or dying corals or weak ones. that is normal. you can get a fish to control your pods but idk if that will help your already declining corals. try it and report back.

 

I just thought it might be the effect of the goniopora coral. I'll use me as an example: i know people don't recommend putting leather corals in small tanks because they produce toxins. well i had a green finger leather that slimed up regularly as it grew and my 3 gal picotope had a nice healthy colony of corals while the leather grew. once i decided to frag off the leather and replace it with another coral. when the leather was removed i saw a very positive response from my already healthy corals. point was that the leather was affecting my corals even though i didn't see detrimental effects.

 

In your case you can already see detrimental effects. goniopora corals are said to be very aggressive corals. i'd go from there unless you can ID a carnivorous pod living in your tank that you think is the cause for killing your other corals.

maybe the goni doesn't just use sweeper tentacles. maybe it uses other chemical warfare.

either way i wish your tank recovery and best of luck

[jimnyo]

thanks newman, that's a great theory. i will try to find ways to test it out. currently, as it stands however, the 3 closest colonies of coral are probably some of the healthiest looking. but maybe the other ones couldn't withstand the effects of toxins b/c they were smaller and had single/fewer polyps.

 

i dipped tonight for like 20 minutes in lugol's. disgusting. what are these? they came crawling out of the rock, not to mention many many, many pods, mostly (HUGE) amphipods, that i could tell. in fact the smaller item on the left is an amphipod, i'm pretty sure. the color in the photo where the toothbrush is pink is the most accurate. the curled up when they died, but before that, they were straight (like in the middle picture), chubby (not like my bristleworms), fuzzy, pink with a black dot in the middle of the body, like an organ or something. they also did not come out with the lugol's dip, as much as when i started spraying the rock with peroxide to kill off some green algae.

 

oh yeah and i forgot to mention that i'm pretty sure there was a sea spider of some sort that i spotted a couple weeks ago. it may be dead, though, b/c i saw something similar floating this week at the surface, but it was a different color.

 

thanks in advance for any help you can offer!

[Chew_Magna]

Those look like baby bristle worms.

 

If you do have a sea spider try to get that out asap. I dealt with one of those way back, sucker was eating my zoas.

[Ruester007]

thanks newman, that's a great theory. i will try to find ways to test it out. currently, as it stands however, the 3 closest colonies of coral are probably some of the healthiest looking. but maybe the other ones couldn't withstand the effects of toxins b/c they were smaller and had single/fewer polyps.

 

i dipped tonight for like 20 minutes in lugol's. disgusting. what are these? they came crawling out of the rock, not to mention many many, many pods, mostly (HUGE) amphipods, that i could tell. in fact the smaller item on the left is an amphipod, i'm pretty sure. the color in the photo where the toothbrush is pink is the most accurate. the curled up when they died, but before that, they were straight (like in the middle picture), chubby (not like my bristleworms), fuzzy, pink with a black dot in the middle of the body, like an organ or something. they also did not come out with the lugol's dip, as much as when i started spraying the rock with peroxide to kill off some green algae.

 

oh yeah and i forgot to mention that i'm pretty sure there was a sea spider of some sort that i spotted a couple weeks ago. it may be dead, though, b/c i saw something similar floating this week at the surface, but it was a different color.

 

thanks in advance for any help you can offer!

As far as the sea spider is what you saw floating around just a molt or did it look fleshy? It might just be growing. Yickes.

[.Newman.]

you mean a zoa spider? shit dude get that out asap! that's what's pissing off your zoas then. maybe other corals too.

 

those little bristleworms you found are no threat. again HH CUC animals. i had hundreds in my pico.

 

keep dipping corals until you find that spider!

[jimnyo]

you mean a zoa spider? shit dude get that out asap! that's what's pissing off your zoas then. maybe other corals too.

 

those little bristleworms you found are no threat. again HH CUC animals. i had hundreds in my pico.

 

keep dipping corals until you find that spider!

 

 

Those look like baby bristle worms.

 

If you do have a sea spider try to get that out asap. I dealt with one of those way back, sucker was eating my zoas.

 

yeah, zoa spider, sea spider...i am scared!! the kids said they saw one and i could only see its feet at the back of a tunnel under the front rock. i couldn't get it to come out. so i looked for the little 'whirly' thing they say you can see when it embeds itself in the polyps, but the polyps are so small, i couldn't really see anything. plus, there's a few that just disappeared, so i am guessing he just ate them outright. if it was him. i'm still not sure about the baby bristle worms b/c these things are WAYYYYY fatter than my bristleworms.

 

will the lugol's dips work on a spider? i keep reading that nothing will really kill them.

 

and the thing that was floating was blacker/darker than the legs i saw moving around. do they really molt? i was hoping it was dead. aughhhh!!!

[.Newman.]

yeah it it's an arthropod it will molt. and most things we see with legs are arthropods in there.

 

do some sort of dips on your rocks to get pests out. that may flush him out. do some research.

 

the fireworms (that's what they are ) are safe. not safe to touch so don't

also check for very tiny nudibranchs. they are a very nasty pest of zoas too. they leave swirly eggs on the zoas. here is one:

do a dip to get the nastys out.

[Chew_Magna]

yeah, zoa spider, sea spider...i am scared!! the kids said they saw one and i could only see its feet at the back of a tunnel under the front rock. i couldn't get it to come out. so i looked for the little 'whirly' thing they say you can see when it embeds itself in the polyps, but the polyps are so small, i couldn't really see anything. plus, there's a few that just disappeared, so i am guessing he just ate them outright. if it was him. i'm still not sure about the baby bristle worms b/c these things are WAYYYYY fatter than my bristleworms.

 

will the lugol's dips work on a spider? i keep reading that nothing will really kill them.

 

and the thing that was floating was blacker/darker than the legs i saw moving around. do they really molt? i was hoping it was dead. aughhhh!!!

I didn't do anything to get rid of mine. I saw it once, spent a couple hours trying to find out what it was and never saw it again. Mine was small, just a bit bigger than a grain of the black sand I was using at the time.

[jimnyo]

wow, i would NEVER catch that nudibranch--it looks too much like the surrounding coral to my newbie eyes. do they change color to camouflage themselves? b/c i have never seen one that color! do you happen to have a pic of what the eggs look like so i know what to look for? thanks!

 

my spider was WAY bigger than a grain of sand. probably between the size of a dime and a pencil eraser--it was hard to judge from only seeing mostly legs.

[.Newman.]

here is another color morph - a bit more green:

 

and eggs(find the 3 nudis in the pic lol):

 

 

If the spider is that big, maybe it was a crab?

here is a zoa spider:

[Chew_Magna]

Nope that's a sea spider.

[.Newman.]

zoa spiders are in the same class as sea spider - hence the striking similarity. they are just small sea spiders that eat zoas.

up in the pic is a zoas worst nightmare besides nudis.

[jimnyo]

yup, i think the legs looked JUST like that zoa spider. maybe i am forgetting the size relative to my hand, b/c i look close up in my 2.5 gal tank and everything looks huge...except my corals, haha.

 

so you are saying nudibranchs DO change color? also, if i have them, i am in deep doodoo b/c i would NEVER be able to recognize those things as eggs.

[.Newman.]

they're easy eggs to recognize. they don't look like they are part of the closed zoa polyp. they are always white and have that tell-tale shape of a swirl. just try your best to check over your colonies.