Acro eating flatworms

[Stircrazy]

Well a friend of mine has been battling with what was once a beautiful tank for about a year now. Last night we discovered the cause. Transparent flatworms that feed on acro's. You cannot see them until they move and even this with out a microscope it is hard. we experimented with a dissecting scope and fresh water does kill them, but we did a 6X dose of flat worm exit in a container and after 15 min there was no effect.

the only other info we could find was in a thread on RC (good pic of the egg masses, and a picture of the flat worm is in Julian Sprung's Invertebrates book) So I am hoping some one here might have more info or know something besides a 6 line that will get rid of them.

Steve

 

[mojoreef]

Aahhh that sucks steve. Thier actually an opique brown color and really hard to find. They do go pretty big though (close to the size of a red planeria). To get rid of them I not sure but perhaps a ph in a bucket??

here is a pic

 

[Stircrazy]

Aahhh that sucks steve. Thier actually an opique brown color and really hard to find. They do go pretty big though (close to the size of a red planeria). To get rid of them I not sure but perhaps a ph in a bucket??

here is a pic

your right about them being hard to find, we looked at them under the dissecting scope, they are clear with tiny brown flecks forming striation patterns that resemble the lines in the coral tissue. They are so clear that they look like the skin of the coral until they move. The ones in your pics are suprisingly easy to see compared to what we had last night. I am trying to find a way to hook my camera to the dissecting scope and take some movies of it moving and such. we had them ranging from tiny about 1/16th of an inch to almost 1/2 an inch. they are able to hang on remarkably good so a power head doesn't have much luck in removing them, but after a 30 second fresh water dip they fall right off with a little swishing. They also seam to be right at the ressesion line of dead coral and tissue. The eggs are quite easy to see they look like little blotches untill you see them under the scope. each bloch is like 100's of eggs. they are very hard to remove, you pretty much have to scrape them off. The only coral we found with eggs on it was left out to die as it was to much of a risk to put them back in.


Steve

 

[EricHugo]

Can someone send me some high res images of these guys for my collection? Thanks.

 

[Aly625]

there is a great artile in this month's issue of coral magazine about flat worms and how to get them out of your tank. one way is to put a plate flush with the sand in your tank, turn off the lights, and hold a flashlight over the plate. the flatworms are atracted to the light so evetually most of them will crawl onto the plate and then you can just remove it from the aquarium. the feed on silicates just like diatoms do. so if you can remove silicates you can also get rid of flatworms. try using ro water if you aren't already.
-aly

 

[bdgirl726]

a pic? were? i think i might have these......but im not sure

 

[NaH2O]

bdgirl726 - Welcome to Reef Frontiers!

I see the photo is lost in this thread...Check out the thread "Acro Eating Flatworms" for additional images and more information.