What's growing on my Zoos

[DanG]

Sorry, no pics, my girlfriend is in euqope with my digi cam.
A couple of days ago there were maybe one or 2 of these polyps growing on the same live rock my main zoo colony is attached to. Today there's 10 or 12 of them. They have a small red centre(about the size of a pinhead) and clear feeler tentacles, the whole thing smaller than the head of a pencil eraser.

Any ideas? Nothing new to the tank in the last month or so, water quality is good(N&N both at 0, ammonia 0, calcium 390, dhk 9).

[sumpfinfishe]

Dan,
What you have described sounds like hydroids to me, theses are nasty little worms that pack a powerful sting, overtake coral colonies, and spread throughout the entire tank. They usually come in with live rock and or coral plugs, which can lay dorment for years until the tank suddenly one day has the right conditions for these things to spread.

I just recently tore down my entire tank to take out every single piece of liverock to manually pluck these things off :evil: I went as far as not just plucking them out with tweezers but instead I actually broke or carved out the LR to be certain that I was getting each entire colony of these worms.

If you have an issolated piece of rock that has these worms then I would suggest removing the rock and striping them off, if they have spread through your tank and are on various parts of the LR then you may want to consider trying a few different other methods first. I spoke with both Eric Borneman and Anthony Calfo as well as Charles Delbeek and they all advised me that manual removal is the only true way to rid of these nasty worms.

Other people have had limited success by either covering them with epoxy or by turkey basting them with Kalkwasser solutions, however in most cases with these two methods they usually come back over time.

These are what mine looked like, since the tear down in May I haven't seen any sign of them and I'm keeping my fins crossed!
Goodluck!


http://members.shaw.ca/sumpfinfishe/images/brownworms.jpg