bristle worms

[roscoe]

I notice when my lights are on I see no bristle worms well maybe one or two but when the lights go out they emerge. I have a six line wrass but I know they go to sleep at night. What type of fish can I put in there to hunt them down at night?

 

[Juanfer]

you could try with an arrow crab..
can you give us more information about your tank??

 

[roscoe]

well its a 40b with mostly sps I have sixline wrass, 2 claener shrimp, black perc, false perc, yellow goby. I'm afraid the arrow crab will try to kill my small black perc.

 

[bbehring]

Put in a small coral banded shrimp. I have one in my 55 along with onyx clowns, gobies, royal gramma, red hawk fish, hermets, snails, pistal shrimp, emerald crab, skunk cleaner shrimp and a fire shrimp. The coral definately keeps my bristle worm popultaion at bay. In fact about every 2 months I stop by my LFS and and take a small bag of bristles off their hands and add to my display. He loves them.

 

[roscoe]

hmmm I'm gonna try that I had them in my previous tank but never noticeed it ever ate them.

 

[MikeS]

With the exception of a few caribbean fire worms, most bristleworms are harmless scavengers and are beneficial to your system. IMO, if you don't have plauge level populations of them, I wouldn't worry too much about them, they tend to limit their populations according to available food. And the cure can often be worse than the disease, lots of shrimp/crabs become oppritunistic feeders in the tank and may not discriminate too much between available food sources...

MikeS

 

[roscoe]

gotcha mike thanks for the info yeah I don't see to much of them I was jsut curiuos I'll let them be for now unless they get totally out of control.

 

[Reeferdude]

I'd leave the lil' critters alone..

 

[ROWAUSA]

dito. they are doing you a valuable service working your sand bed.

 

[roscoe]

I don't do the sand thing I'm all bare bottom.

 

[twilliard]

Your feeding habits will dictate the population.
They help keep the rock cleaned out too

 

[roscoe]

I feed only once a day.

 

[ROWAUSA]

you are missing such a wonderful part of the biological environment. if you are just propagating corals, then bare bottom works.

 

[roscoe]

nah much easier to maintain I might put sand in my next set up thats a maybe.

 

[Sparks]

if you have larger 3"+ ones, there's not alot besides a nasty wrasse that may eat them.

here's the best way, to get rid of them:
take a long handled net(so it's easy for you to quickly pull out) with holes that aren't super fine(i.e. no brine shrimp nets), put a few cheap freshwater algae tablets in the net, then drop the net in the very bottom of the tank, so a fish can't swim in there(although it doesn't really matte if they can), then leave the net in there for 1.5+ hours(gotta give the worms time to get to the net) with the light off.

I get alot of bristle worms each time(like 20+) I do it. It's not so much that bristleworms totally love the algae tablets, it's that everything else besides them doesn't want anything to do with them. The bristle worms start to come out with 2 minutes of putting an algae tablet in there.

The reason for a net without super fine holes, is because abuot half the worms going for the tablets go through the back of the net and get stuck halfway thro the hole, trapping their bodies in there.