Hello all,
I have a new tank with no inhabitants. I had some red ogo I rinsed well and kept in some fresh salt water for a week or two before adding to the tank. I didn't see anything on it and thought I'd be fine. Nope. I now have literally thousands of these crawling hydroids. They're the star shaped ones that like the glass, but also have found a home all over my algae, rock, and even powerheads. There are also branching hydroids, but they're much less problematic. My tank is cycled, but I do not want to go through purchasing and quarantining new inhabitants with these hydroids all over. I had a very abundant copepod population, but they wiped them out. They went from just one or two (that I saw) to thousands in a week or so.
My questions are:
How do I treat this? I have seen there's a specific medication that can be used, but it leaches out of the rock for a long time.
Some people have said they go away on their own. Can I starve them out since there's nothing else in the tank except the Red Ogo?
Could adding something that eats them be helpful? Does anything eat these stinging jerks?
I do not want to try to manually remove them. They do sting, and it's barely noticeable until 3-4 of them are stinging at the same time.
Parameters:
Ammonia: 0
Nitrite: .2
Nitrate: 5-10 (hard to tell color)
Phosphate: less than .02
Alkalinity: 8.6
Ca: 410
Mg:1280
pH: 8-8.2
Salinity: 35 ppt
Temp: 80
I have a new tank with no inhabitants. I had some red ogo I rinsed well and kept in some fresh salt water for a week or two before adding to the tank. I didn't see anything on it and thought I'd be fine. Nope. I now have literally thousands of these crawling hydroids. They're the star shaped ones that like the glass, but also have found a home all over my algae, rock, and even powerheads. There are also branching hydroids, but they're much less problematic. My tank is cycled, but I do not want to go through purchasing and quarantining new inhabitants with these hydroids all over. I had a very abundant copepod population, but they wiped them out. They went from just one or two (that I saw) to thousands in a week or so.
My questions are:
How do I treat this? I have seen there's a specific medication that can be used, but it leaches out of the rock for a long time.
Some people have said they go away on their own. Can I starve them out since there's nothing else in the tank except the Red Ogo?
Could adding something that eats them be helpful? Does anything eat these stinging jerks?
I do not want to try to manually remove them. They do sting, and it's barely noticeable until 3-4 of them are stinging at the same time.
Parameters:
Ammonia: 0
Nitrite: .2
Nitrate: 5-10 (hard to tell color)
Phosphate: less than .02
Alkalinity: 8.6
Ca: 410
Mg:1280
pH: 8-8.2
Salinity: 35 ppt
Temp: 80