Pods stomping all over my zoas!

[wattson]

Get a Matted file Fish and Halocoris wrasse for starters,see how good they knock down the population. Any kind of pods in a zoa/paly tank is not good, sadly learnt that the hard way.
One of the worst parts of this situation is most pods come out after dark when all fish are sleeping ..try to see if somewhere on the interwebs about a pod trap to try to catch some after dark

 

[Just John]

I’ve dipped the coral twice in Coral RX the past week and it doesn’t help *that* much because the pods just find the coral again lol, but once the pod runs off the polyp it will open up again within a few minutes. I don’t see any damage at all either, so I really think the pods running around the polyps just cause them to close up briefly.
Do you think target feeding reef roids into the zoa colonies would encourage pods to hang out more there? I typically feed them twice a week but have been taking a breather the past week to see if the pods diminish. I love the growth the reef roids gives but if it’s causing these pods to hang around the coral I need to cut back!

They are living off of the reef roids. I fed my zoas the same way as you and had TONS of them. I had to stop feeding for a while because of an algae issue and they all disappeared.

 

[LRT]

Best way to figure out if your pods will eat your corals is put a little mysis in the tank after lights out. If they scavenge and eat the mysis they will no doubt end up eating corals when food is sparse and especially if pod population is left unchecked and allowed to get out of control.
Get a lid on your tank and throw a wrasse in there to crush the pods

 

[zuri]

Best way to figure out if your pods will eat your corals is put a little mysis in the tank after lights out. If they scavenge and eat the mysis they will no doubt end up eating corals when food is sparse and especially if pod population is left unchecked and allowed to get out of control.
Get a lid on your tank and throw a wrasse in there to crush the pods

wrasse is good for pods but to truly get pods/amphipods under control I would suggest a springer dotty back will get under in the rock/in the rock as they dig hangouts everywhere that all the fish seem to use.

 

[wattson]

Pods eating the corals is one topic , the other topic is pods crawling in and on the corals being agitators is still going to happen . which is not good.
The general consensus think pods are either good ones or bad ones,,which in the most reef aquaria ,,they are all bad except for being a food source for another type predator in the tank.

 

[wattson]

A reef aquarium will do just fine if not better with NO types of pods in it .

 

[george9]

Yeah I really don’t think they’re eating them (yet) because the polyps are not damaged. They’re clearly just pestering the polyps when they crawl over them. They aren’t even very big (yet) either so I’ll cut back on the coral foods to hopefully decimate the population a bit and/or prevent them from growing in size and population. But that may have the unintended consequence of actually causing them to start eating the zoas because they can’t find other food lol…time will tell I guess.

Starting to quickly hate pods. They’re great if you have a predator that likes them but in my tank they’re just pests!

 

[Tonyreeffish]

Yeah I really don’t think they’re eating them (yet) because the polyps are not damaged. They’re clearly just pestering the polyps when they crawl over them. They aren’t even very big (yet) either so I’ll cut back on the coral foods to hopefully decimate the population a bit and/or prevent them from growing in size and population. But that may have the unintended consequence of actually causing them to start eating the zoas because they can’t find other food lol…time will tell I guess.

Starting to quickly hate pods. They’re great if you have a predator that likes them but in my tank they’re just pests!

It really depends on the species of pods. I keep all zoas and I will NOT keep any kind of amphipods in my tank or asterina starfish. Smaller species of copepods are fine in my opinion. Tisbe and apocyclops are relatively small. Ive had some gnarly Isopods in a tank before that had a longer body and were super quick and were maybe half the size of an amphipod. I believe those were tissue eaters as well. I have a video somewhere of 2 of the isopods fighting, ill try to find it.

 

[JohnNYC8]

Brace yourself, you're about to hear a whole lot of people say that an amphipod would never hurt a healthy coral.

Here's a video I took today that sure does look like an amphipod beating up my zoas

Pic under white light. Should I pull the coral and dip?