A forest of hydroids

[marie]

Does anyone have any ideas on how to get rid of these things or maybe something that eats them? My foxface eats the digitate hydroids but doesn't even look at these things and they are literaly taking over my tank

Crappy photos but they are the white string like things you can see coating everything

[Starry]

I pulled them off with tweezers, then squirted affected area with vinager. Rinsed well and returned to tank. That was a week ago and I havent seen them since. I only had about 10-15 heads though on 1 rock.

[marie]

Picking these guys off with tweezers is an impossibility i'm afraid, the pics above are of my overflow about 24" under the water and behind the rocks and they are spread right across the tank. Pocillipora appear to have no defence against them

[ref leppard]

If you need another fish , try a copperband butterfly( rock pickers)

[mark]

I've got them also and been doing quite a bit of reading on them. Seems there's really no way to get rid of them other than the classic nutrient control (but starve them, starve my corals) or manually. The way they started was looking like they were going to take over the tank completely but does appear that the spread has stopped. Hoping that they just might be another phase of the tank and eventually die back.

I have considered removing my rock and hitting the areas with a butane torch but really can't see myself doing this.

It was on Canreef the first I heard of CBB (here post 7). As Potters was also mentioned I followed up in another thread got one but it never made it out of QT so can't say if they might work as well.

[Snappy]

Kalk is rumoured to work. I had them bad on one particular coral and they eventually went away but my h2o is low nutrient.

[sharuq1]

You could try putting kalk or joe's juice all over them. I had this problem really bad on one of my rocks once and had no kalk/juice to take care of it, sadly I had to torch the rock with a blow torch to kill them (also had to torch some bad algae I couldn't get rid of but that is another tale), and you know what? frickin buggers...some still lived, lol!

If you want to go double on their hydroid butts juice/kalk them and then cover them with putty or something. I don't think much could survive that...I would hope...

[marie]

Originally Posted by Snappy

Kalk is rumoured to work. I had them bad on one particular coral and they eventually went away but my h2o is low nutrient.

If I kalked every hydroid in my tank, the resulting precipitation snow storm would make my tank look like the east coast in the winter .

I'm pretty sure it is because of my recent nutrient problems that I'm having problems with hydroids and in the long term they probably will start to disappear on their own...unfortunately that doesn't help my ailing corals in the short term

[mark]

I tried kalk paste to no effect.

Turned off the pumps slowly encased them in paste for hours and a few hour after the pumps back on, they were out again.