Hoping its not Oenone fulgida worm

[tinyreefer]

Hey everyone thanks for checking in. I've had this tank running for around a month now and I started it with a mix of live rock from my lfs and the rock from my previous tank. I started noticing these worms a couple weeks after I added the rock. They are bright yellow with a slight green shimmer to them. They didnt bother me at first because I value bristles and others as part of a diverse clean up crew, bit this last week I have noticed some concerning behavior. You can see in one of the pics it is climbing into my blasto and irritating it. I have seen this worm reach for this blasto on multiple occasions. Last night I found a bigger one climbing into my rock flower unfazed. So far I have only had one snail death so no unusual amount after adding around 20 to the tank. I've seen at least two in the display and one in the sump, so it's safe to say the live rock I got is infested. These guys are really fast too, I've gotten them between my pitchers by moving slowly, but they retract into their hole faster than I can squeeze them shut. Do they look like Oenone fulgida to you? how much trouble am I in?

 

[ISpeakForTheSeas]

Definitely from the Oenonidae family; I can't see the head region well enough to say for sure which genus (so I can't confirm if it's Oenone fulgida or not, though it's definitely at least related to it).

Regardless, it's not likely to be a critter you want in your tank, as these worms tend to feed on mollusks (bivalves - clams, oysters, mussels, etc. - and snails), and yours are clearly irritating your corals.

 

[tinyreefer]

Thanks Ispeakfortheseas. I managed to catch the same one in the previous pics overnight using a 3d printed funnel trap and took some pictures at 40x magnification, maybe we can see what it is now for sure. It was around 3 inches long when just crawling around the bowl and stretched maybe 4.5 inches when I saw it in the trap. When I hit it with freshwater to kill it it releases a red tinted mucous. Here are some microscope pictures of the head, tail, and midsection. Hopefully I can catch the bigger one I've seen soon!

 

[ISpeakForTheSeas]

Thanks Ispeakfortheseas. I managed to catch the same one in the previous pics overnight using a 3d printed funnel trap and took some pictures at 40x magnification, maybe we can see what it is now for sure. It was around 3 inches long when just crawling around the bowl and stretched maybe 4.5 inches when I saw it in the trap. When I hit it with freshwater to kill it it releases a red tinted mucous. Here are some microscope pictures of the head, tail, and midsection. Hopefully I can catch the bigger one I've seen soon!

Great pics! A few questions to figure out what kind of worm you have:

The first pic you uploaded shows the head with the four eye spots - are there three, stubby, little tentacles tucked up under the lip of the bristle-free section of skin right behind the two middle eyes?

Is that bristle-free section one ring or two? Does it look like one on top but two underneath?

Also, if you look at the underside of the head, are there two more (probably tiny) eyespots anywhere, or not? (Some Oenone species have eyes on the underside of their heads close to the very front.)

 

[tinyreefer]

Thanks for the quick reply! I just fished it out of the trash to look again haha. I do see three round bumps behind the middle eyes. And flipping the head over I did not find any eye spots on the underside of the head

 

[ISpeakForTheSeas]

Thanks for the quick reply! I just fished it out of the trash to look again haha. I do see three round bumps behind the middle eyes. And flipping the head over I did not find any eye spots on the underside of the head

The three bumps there confirm it is an Oenone species; I'll take a look later when I've got more time and see if I can't key out the species - I'll post back here if I can nail down the specific ID for you.

 

[ISpeakForTheSeas]

Definitely from the Oenonidae family;

Sorry, went and double checked myself with the presence of the hooded hooks on the worm, as those are typically found on Lumbrinerids rather than Oenonids, but the hooks are found on Oenone species as well. Oenone species look remarkably similar to Lysarete species - which are Lumbrinerids - when ignoring jaw morphology, but they have split portion dividing the left/right sides of the body above the three tentacles over the eyes (called a peristomial notch).

The three bumps there confirm it is an Oenone species;

Had to double check this one as well: Oenone species look remarkably similar to Lysarete species - which are Lumbrinerids - when ignoring jaw morphology, but they have split portion dividing the left/right sides of the body for a little way above the three tentacles over the eyes.


Anyway, yeah, the lack of eyes on the underside of the head confirm that it's Oenone fulgida, and not one of the other two currently accepted species in the genus.

 

[tinyreefer]

Thank you for the detailed breakdown! I'll work on getting them all out. I am slightly concerned they could have gotten to my (hibernating?) tiger conch. I haven't seen him on around 10 days. My understanding is they will bury themselves for extended periods to grow their shell, but are Oenone fulgida capable of hunting beneath the sand bed? I also don't know what size snail they would consider prey, just deciding if I should poke around for the conch in case it is rotting somewhere after being killed.

As a side note, I tried to research quite a bit myself on the subject before posting here and wasn't able to find much detail. Are there any specific sources or books you wluse or would reccomend? I would love to broaden my knowledge on the lesser talked about species we find in our tanks, and be better able to spot something then properly identify and read about it.


Thank you again for your attention on this thread. I really appreciate it and all you do for this community!

 

[ISpeakForTheSeas]

I am slightly concerned they could have gotten to my (hibernating?) tiger conch. I haven't seen him on around 10 days. My understanding is they will bury themselves for extended periods to grow their shell, but are Oenone fulgida capable of hunting beneath the sand bed? I also don't know what size snail they would consider prey, just deciding if I should poke around for the conch in case it is rotting somewhere after being killed.

I actually don't know how big of prey they can go for - I would assume they can hunt beneath the sand, but I can't say for certain (not a lot of info is available on their feeding; most of it actually comes from hobbyists).

As a side note, I tried to research quite a bit myself on the subject before posting here and wasn't able to find much detail. Are there any specific sources or books you wluse or would reccomend? I would love to broaden my knowledge on the lesser talked about species we find in our tanks, and be better able to spot something then properly identify and read about it.

It depends on what specifically you're looking to learn about them, but I've got plenty I can recommend.

For Oenone fulgida and its relatives (as well as other polychaetes) specifically, the below are (probably overkill) a good place to start:

The Current State of Eunicida (Annelida) Systematics and Biodiversity

In this study, we analyze the current state of knowledge on extant Eunicida systematics, morphology, feeding, life history, habitat, ecology, distribution patterns, local diversity and exploitation. Eunicida is an order of Errantia annelids characterized by the presence of ventral mandibles and...

www.mdpi.com

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283202150_New_and_previously_known_species_of_Oenonidae_Polychaeta_Annelida_from_Lizard_Island_Great_Barrier_Reef_Australia

https://www.dcceew.gov.au/sites/default/files/env/resources/d603deda-71f4-4647-a3a8-0fe7945f5f32/files/4a-polychaetes-01-polychaeta-02.pdf

Diet of Worms Emended: An Update of Polychaete Feeding Guilds - Appendix A - Family-by-Family Review
(The paper)
https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-marine-010814-020007 (The link you can download the Appendix from)

Diet of Worms Emended: An Update of Polychaete Feeding Guilds | Annual Reviews

Polychaetes are common in most marine habitats and dominate many infaunal communities. Functional guild classification based on taxonomic identity and morphology has linked community structure to ecological function. The functional guilds now include osmotrophic siboglinids as well as...

www.annualreviews.org

Now, the below will probably be a "little" overwhelming - if you want help figuring out what to use for your specific purposes, feel free to ask and I can point you in the right direction. I've probably forgotten some sources/databases (I added a few this time around), but the below is more than enough for most things.


For general learning:

For just general research stuff, Google search (not Google Scholar Search) is your friend as it can help you find links on the following sites (assuming no special academic/research access and that you want to avoid paywalls as much as possible):

-Research Gate
-Academia.edu (you need a free account to read the stuff)
-JSTOR (you need a free account to read the stuff - they've got a lot of older stuff, but I've found some of the older stuff is really good/contains a lot of detail)


These next ones are good (sometimes really good) but more likely (sometimes very likely) to have paywalls or require access to an article through an institution - sometimes you can still get free articles or good info from just the abstract they show on the page, but other times you can't:

-PubMed
-Springer
-Elsevier
-ScienceDirect
-Tandfonline
-BioMedCentral
-Springer
-Frontiers
-Academic.oup
-Nature
-MDPI
-SciELO - Brazil

And this definitely doesn't cover every site out there - these are just some of the more common ones that pop up for me.


For info on fish/inverts (profiles on each), the list below is pretty good (again, definitely not complete - a notable one I know is missing is Inverts.WallaWalla.edu):

Yeah, none are perfect by any means, but here are some that are generally pretty good (I'm sure I'm forgetting a few; I left a few that are unlikely to be relevant or just don't contain much info out on purpose):

-LiveAquaria (hobbyist oriented)
-Saltcorner (hobbyist oriented)
-JungleDragon
-FishBase/SeaLifeBase
-Fishes of Australia (Museums Victoria)
-Mexican Fish
-Florida Museum of Natural History
-Indian River Lagoon Species Inventory
-Shorefishes (Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute)
-Seaunseen
-WildSingapore
-Kwajalein Underwater
-NCFishes (rarely pops up, but good for some species found on the Eastern US north of Florida)
-INPN (it's French, but comes in handy sometimes)
-Frogfish.ch (frogfish specific, but by far the best frogfish technical info site around)

Edit: New I'd forgotten a few:
-MarineBio (Marine Conservation Society)
-Reef Life Survey
-The Online Guide to the Animals of Trinidad and Tobago (I'm not sure if you can purposefully search through these files on their site somehow, but it comes up pretty often with Google searches - it's species profiles compiled by The University of the West Indies at St. Augustine, Trinidad, and Tobago)
-Eprints@CMFRI (similar to the above, I can't get it to let me search their library on their site, but it comes up pretty often with Google searches - there are a number of species profiles compiled by the Open Access Institutional Repository of Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute)

You may come across some oddball college papers on occasion as well, but I've tried to list the most commonly useful one I can remember.


For more ID-oriented stuff (some with useful profiles):

The links in my quote below have a ton of good info like this, but none of them have all of the info.

For fish pics, info, and names when basically all you know is what the fish looks like, Reeflex, Fish Base (the link above the quote specifically), and Salt Corner would (IMO) probably be the easiest ones to use when attempting to find a fish (especially if you're not well versed in the taxonomy), but - as with all of the databases below - the more you know about what the fish is taxonomically/by common name, the easier it would be to find the fish. (Just as a note here, Salt Corner is primarily hobby oriented, Reeflex and Solar Slug both have some hobby related aspects, the rest are pretty much entirely professional oriented.)

The links:
Fish Identification: Find class

some good databases with info (some are better and/or easier to use than others):

WoRMS - World Register of Marine Species

www.marinespecies.org

Welcome to Saltcorner! A saltwater aquarium reference site for hobbyists.

Marine Aquarium Library, Articles, Questions and Answers, Photo Galleries, and Product / Book Reviews.

www.saltcorner.com

Search FishBase

Shorefishes - Homepage

Fishes of the Greater Caribbean

biogeodb.stri.si.edu

TreatmentBank - Plazi

TreatmentBank is a service to liberate data from scholarly publications and disseminate it as FAIR data

plazi.org

Corals of the World

The Sponge Guide

spongeguide.uncw.edu

World Porifera Database

Sponge Barcoding Project - covering the complete taxonomic range of Porifera

The Sponge Barcoding Project is the first worldwide barcoding project on any non-bilaterian taxon and covers the complete taxonomic range of Porifera.

www.spongebarcoding.org

Sea anemones: Actiniaria.com
These last few are either in a different language (not in English) or have both English and another language on the site:

Mainpage Reeflex

reeflex.net

DORIS - Données d'Observations pour la Reconnaissance et l'Identification de la faune et la flore Subaquatique

Le site DORIS de la FFESSM vise à recenser, illustrer et décrire le maximum d'espèces, communes ou rares, visibles en plongée dans nos eaux de métropole et d'outre-mer.

doris.ffessm.fr

| Nederlands Soortenregister

www.nederlandsesoorten.nl

Starfish: Photos of fishes, invertebrates (molluscs, crustaceans, echinoderms, worms, corals, sponges, jellyfish and more), reptiles, rays and sharks. Start your dive into the coral reef!

Zubi's wetpage: coralreef, scuba diving, marine animals, photos, travelogs, frogfish / starfish: Korallenriff, Unterwasserfotos, Reiseberichte (Tauchen Asien und Rotes Meer), Anglerfisch

www.starfish.ch

Edit: Remembered a few more:

wildsingapore homepage

You CAN make a difference for Singapore's wild places! Simply explore, express and ACT! Find out more in this one-stop location on Singapore's wildlife and wild places.

www.wildsingapore.com

The Biodiversity of Singapore

A Digital Reference Collection for Singapore

singapore.biodiversity.online

Indian River Lagoon Species Inventory Home BOLD Systems v3

India Biodiversity Portal (IBP)
Invert E Base
Lizard Island Field Guide (lifg.australian.museum)

Just to add for anyone interested, a page with a bunch of sea slug related links, including the Sea Slug Forum, which is good enough that I've also listed it below:

Slug-Related Web Sites (Elysia and others) – Solar Sea Slug Blog

solarslug.info

The Sea Slug Forum - Home Page