What is this spawn

[canadianbigkat]

Something spawned in my tank and is all over the glass. Any ideas, they are moving around now.

[paddyob]

Flat worms. You need to get those under control fast. They are single celled and split constantly.. one becomes two...two becomes four...etc.


Did you get a new coral or rock recently? They may have come on it.


I suggest finding a fish that will eat them..... Green Spotted Mandarin cleaned them out of my tank in about a week.

[ferret]

Unfortunately to let you know those are flatworms. Not easy to get rid of, introducing some specified kind of wrasse or nudibranch may eat them up. Heavy feeding will speed up their population. You may siphon part of them away during water change.HTH

[canadianbigkat]

Ill get on top of it now, should be able scrape a bunch off with a razor now. Probably would have fed the buggers without your advice since everybody loves a spawn....well except for the bad ones.

Thanks again

[gobytron]

wooohooo...
planarians...

just an FYI, it's actually rare for a mandarin to eat them.
I have 2, and they will not touch my colony of flatworms.

you do occasionally get lucky though, but it's is quite rare from discussions with LFS and experience to find one that will make any dent in a planarian population.


I had a really bad breakout of these worms in my tank, they were literally covering my sps...I just bumped my flow WAY up for a month or so and the population died off almost completely...

[patpare]

I have a blenny scooter that has completly cleaned them out of my tank.

[daniella3d]

I also have 2 mandarins and they don't eat them at all, not interested.

My yellow and checkerboard wrasse sort of eated a little of them but I had an infestation the size of New York. I now try to syphon out as much as I can each day with a pipette and will get a few blue velvet nudibranchs since this is their only food. Problem is that they are expensive, fragile and live only 3 months :(


This is a real pita to get rid of.

In deed they just plain hate the flow and if you can put it higher it's good, if you cannot because like me you have sensitive animals like tube anemones and alveoporas, then it's not an option.

they are poison and when they die in large number it can poison the tank, fish and coral included. It is best not to use product like flatworm exit as this will make them die all together and pollute the tank and will also kill beneficial pods.


wooohooo...
planarians...

just an FYI, it's actually rare for a mandarin to eat them.
I have 2, and they will not touch my colony of flatworms.

you do occasionally get lucky though, but it's is quite rare from discussions with LFS and experience to find one that will make any dent in a planarian population.


I had a really bad breakout of these worms in my tank, they were literally covering my sps...I just bumped my flow WAY up for a month or so and the population died off almost completely...

[Delphinus]

A canary wrasse did the trick for me. Pretty little fish, doesn't need a huge tank (but does need a covered tank - they WILL jump sooner or later and it's just better for that when they do, they fall back into the tank and not the floor), otherwise totally reef safe and doesn't seem to bother or get bothered by any other tank mates. Win all around!

They do need a sand bed for sleeping though. If you don't have sand in your tank you could have a little tupperware thing with sand just so they can sleep. They do get all stressed out and stuff if they can't bury themselves into sand at night.