Copepods eating my zoanthids???

[anthonymart44]

Good evening, I’m wondering if anyone can help me with a problem I am starting to have in my tank. I have noticed what started as these small little white specs in my tank to what seem to be much larger and more visible copepods or amphipods (not totally sure the difference). About two months ago my tank had a lot of brown hair algae and I started keeping up with my water changes and manually removing what I could. It was even growing on my zoanthid corals. All of a sudden, it started to go away and was completely away from the zoanthids. The rest of the tank had hair algae still, but as of now, there is zero hair algae left in the tank. I couldn’t totally tell why, but I started to notice these little organisms crawling around in the tank that I hadn’t noticed before. One of my zoanthids hasn’t been opening for a bit and is just getting smaller, I’m assuming dying. I was looking tonight with the lights off on the tank and saw a ton of these little things all around it. I have other zoas in the tank and want to make sure this doesn’t happen to them. Are they eating the coral because it was dying, or did they cause it to die? I’ll attach a video if possible.

 

[anthonymart44]

 

[Mr. Mojo Rising]

Not copepods, copepods are so small they are almost invisible.
It looks like amphipods maybe?
Bumping for you

 

[twentyleagues]

Those are definitely amphipods. It is possible they are scavenging bits of the algae or are attracted to a dying coral. Most of my display tanks have always had wrasses and or mandarins so the pod population was low in display tank but high in sump and fuge. In my last system I had 3 100g stock tanks as the sump, one was a frag tank and I would take frags to the display and shake them off in the water to dislodge quite a few amphipods for the fish to eat never saw them actually cause damage to the frags and I grew a lot of zoas.

 

[PotatoPig]

BTW - directly uploaded videos don’t play on a lot of peoples devices, it works better if you upload to YouTube and then link the media in from there.

 

[anthonymart44]

BTW - directly uploaded videos don’t play on a lot of peoples devices, it works better if you upload to YouTube and then link the media in from there.

 

[Sophie"s mom]

Following this because I have several zoa's and a ton of amphipods!

 

[GSPClown94]

Like others already mentioned those are amphipods. They are likely eating something between the polyps of your zoa colony but that can still irritate the coral with them crawling all over it and cause the polyps to close up. You can try increasing flow to get rid of detritus between the zoa polyps and keep the amphipods away. It's possible they are eating the coral if it is dying but the only time I've seen amphipods actually eating a zoa is after I fried a frag from sitting too long in 3% hydrogen peroxide and its tissue was peeling off.

 

[ChrisfromBrick]

copepods wouldnt eat zoas. The opposite would occur, I presume.

 

[PotatoPig]

The zoas in question look a bit like they have algae on them - that’s probably what the amphipods are going after. On the outside chance they actually are eating the zoas it’s more likely the zoas are dying from something else and the amphipods are cleaning away dead tissue.

 

[taricha]

A ridiculous overabundance of amphipods means there are basically no fish in the tank that do much to eat them.
Under those circumstances they can eat some polyps.