Please Help ID

[ReeferND]

Hello everyone! I really need some help IDing what is in my tank. Since I noticed this, all my corals are closed, water cloudy, and some paly heads have died. I am afraid I am going to lose the tank soon! IM nuvo 30L, ammonia = 0, nitrite = 0, nitrate =0, cal=420, alk=8.7, mag=1360. I do a 40% water change every week without fail. Tank is about 8 months old. Please help

[RayWhisperer]

Old phone here. What am I supposed to be seeing? 

 

Cloudy water is almost always bacterial, in an established tank. 

 

Anything else you've done recently? What about filter maintenance?

[A Little Blue]

9 minutes ago, RayWhisperer said:

Old phone here. What am I supposed to be seeing? 

 

Cloudy water is almost always bacterial, in an established tank. 

 

Anything else you've done recently? What about filter maintenance?

If you zoom in on blue wall, you will see vein like spiderweb.  No idea what that it tho. 

Edit. I might be seeing things though 😂

[RayWhisperer]

1 hour ago, A Little Blue said:

If you zoom in on blue wall, you will see vein like spiderweb.  No idea what that it tho. 

Edit. I might be seeing things though 😂

Yeah. iPhone 3, not gonna happen. However, your description helps. Check this image. Similar? If so, hydroids. Some say bad. Thought, they seem to fade away in my systems. Removal will be needed if they are killing corals, though.

[A Little Blue]

1 minute ago, RayWhisperer said:

Yeah. iPhone 3, not gonna happen. However, your description helps. Check this image. Similar? If so, hydroids. Some say bad. Thought, they seem to fade away in my systems. Removal will be needed if they are killing corals, though.

Hard to tell. But there is some similarity. 

[mitten_reef]

2 minutes ago, RayWhisperer said:

Yeah. iPhone 3, not gonna happen. However, your description helps. Check this image. Similar? If so, hydroids. Some say bad. Thought, they seem to fade away in my systems. Removal will be needed if they are killing corals, though.

Here's what the OP said in the link above, quoted below, in case you don't feel like going over to his thread.  He has a pretty good journal going (starting?) though. 

"I noticed that I have this stuff growing on the glass, it is long l, white, and branches. I think most would initially say algae but I am wondering if it is not some kind of slime mold.....I truly have no idea and cannot find any pictures of it anywhere. To give a better idea of what I am seeing, it looks like a lightning strike with thousands of side branches." 

 

sorry, @ReeferND, not much help other than pointing Ray to the right direction.

[A Little Blue]

10 minutes ago, micoastreefing said:

Here's what the OP said in the link above, quoted below, in case you don't feel like going over to his thread.  He has a pretty good journal going (starting?) though. 

"I noticed that I have this stuff growing on the glass, it is long l, white, and branches. I think most would initially say algae but I am wondering if it is not some kind of slime mold.....I truly have no idea and cannot find any pictures of it anywhere. To give a better idea of what I am seeing, it looks like a lightning strike with thousands of side branches." 

 

sorry, @ReeferND, not much help other than pointing Ray to the right direction.

I have seen it as well, but it didn’t help much. 

[Snow_Phoenix]

Are these 'branches' mobile in any sort of way?

 

Few years back, someone on the site had something similar and it turned out to be caprellidae (skeleton shrimp). I know it's a long-shot, and most probably just hydroids as Ray said earlier, but if you have a clearer pic, I'd like to see it. 

[RayWhisperer]

Did you ever have that thing happen to you? You know the one? The one where you know the exact image you need. You’ve seen it dozens of times. It’s always there when you are looking for something slightly different. Well, that’s whats happening to me right now. I’m pretty sure it’s hydroids. I’m pretty sure I know which type. I know I’ve seen them in my tanks, LFS tanks, as well as online.i just can’t find the image and I don’t remember the name. 

 

Crappy, not exactly what I was looking for, but the best I can find now. 

 

[ReeferND]

Thanks everyone for the support. To answer some questions. My filtration is a tunze 9001 skimmer, filter floss, carbon and gfo...both in a bag and not a reactor. This is on top of 40% weekly water changes. It looks very similar to the hydroids but doesn't have the little masses associated with it. It truly does look like an venous or arterial system. There is no green in it so I assume it is not photosynthetic. I have included some images that I hop you are better capable of seeing. I also included some pictures of what I can only call white algae on the rocks and I cannot help but wonder if they are connected\the same thing just on different surfaces. I dosed 2ml of hydrogen peroxide to the tank.......not sure if smart or bad. Again sorry for the photos but I am not good at taking pictures with these lights. 

 

Thanks again! I really hope I can save my animals!

[ReeferND]

Also, I do not see it move at all. Stopped and watched for 10 minutes and nothing. There is also no Brown in it. I will Google hydroids to see if I can find a similar image but from the last 2 images I am thinking it is not.

[ReeferND]

Alright folks. I just turned my whites all the way up for these. Much better, some better than others. I am now seeing a resemblance to the hydroids. In the one pic, you can see the dead paly head with the same white stuff on it.

[ReeferND]

@RayWhisperer, thanks for that suggestion. The more I look into it the more I find hydroids to be the case. What do I do? Anyone tried Hydroxs? Seems to be popular in the seahorse group of us.

[banasophia]

I have tons of hydroids. 😞  I found that wedge sea hares eat them, but without enough algae in my tank, I had to pass the sea hare along to another local reefer after it devoured most of the hydroids in a few days, and then they just grew back in a week or two. 😞

 

I’ll be be getting a yellow coris wrasse soon to see if it will eat them.... 

 

 

 

[ReeferND]

Thanks @banasophia, I am always looking for biological control. Do you know of a place where you can get them online? I live in a remote state but could perhaps ask my lfs to find one. I imagine though, because they can't deep into the rocks, it isn't a cure but I am ok with a control

[RayWhisperer]

I've never had a hydroid problem bad enough to deal with. So, I'm afraid I won't be of much help. I do know sea hares aren't your answer, as they need a constant supply of algae to eat. No nano can support one, long term. I didn't know they would eat hydroids. 

 

Snow brought up skeleton shrimp. IIRC, they eat hydroids. However, there are probably a thousand different types of skeleton shrimp. And I suspect they may only focus on a certain type. Meaning specialized in their preference. However, it may be worth a try. Worst case, your fish have a fantastic food source until they eat them all.

[RayWhisperer]

http://www.gulfspecimen.org/

that place sells them.

[BrentSA]

Been there but luckily I only had 5 frags which was newly added and could easily be removed and I ended up removing all my rocks and had no fish yet either , put aiptasia x into a squirt bottle from a garden nursery and sprayed that directly onto the rocks and that I did three times a day for a week , which may have been overkill . I had a quarantine tank though to house the frags  . Then dosed the main tank aswel and removed what I could from the glass with a siphon that ran into a filter sock and then finally dosed my main tank with aiptisia x aswel . 

[banasophia]

36 minutes ago, RayWhisperer said:

I've never had a hydroid problem bad enough to deal with. So, I'm afraid I won't be of much help. I do know sea hares aren't your answer, as they need a constant supply of algae to eat. No nano can support one, long term. I didn't know they would eat hydroids. 

 

Snow brought up skeleton shrimp. IIRC, they eat hydroids. However, there are probably a thousand different types of skeleton shrimp. And I suspect they may only focus on a certain type. Meaning specialized in their preference. However, it may be worth a try. Worst case, your fish have a fantastic food source until they eat them all.

 

12 hours ago, Snow_Phoenix said:

Are these 'branches' mobile in any sort of way?

 

Few years back, someone on the site had something similar and it turned out to be caprellidae (skeleton shrimp). I know it's a long-shot, and most probably just hydroids as Ray said earlier, but if you have a clearer pic, I'd like to see it. 

 

@RayWhisperer and @Snow_Phoenix, can you please clarify? I thought Snow was saying that what the OP had might BE skeleton shrimp, not to use skeleton shrimp to control it?

 

I do agree it is hard to keep a sea hare fed in a nano... it only worked as a short term solution for me because there wasn’t enough algae for it to eat after eating the hydroids, so I had to pass it along to another reefer. It would not eat the two types of red macro I added to my tank for it, or the nori I tried to feed it. 

 

I will report back on whether the yellow coris wrasse works. 

[Snow_Phoenix]

2 minutes ago, banasophia said:

 

 

@RayWhisperer and @Snow_Phoenix, can you please clarify? I thought Snow was saying that what the OP had might BE skeleton shrimp, not to use skeleton shrimp to control it?

 

I do agree it is hard to keep a sea hare fed in a nano... it only worked as a short term solution for me because there wasn’t enough algae for it to eat after eating the hydroids, so I had to pass it along to another reefer. It would not eat the two types of red macro I added to my tank for it, or the nori I tried to feed it. 

 

I will report back on whether the yellow coris wrasse works. 

Yeah, I meant they *might be skeleton shrimp (this was before getting clearer pics) but I think Ray is right - these appear to be hydroids. I didn't know that skeleton shrimp could be used to munch on hydroids until Ray mentioned it. That was new info for me. 

As for a sea hare, try not to use one. They poop a LOT (at least the species my LFS brings in on a regular basis does) and grow fairly big. I'm uncertain if wrasses eat hydroids. As far as I know, they prefer pods. 

[RayWhisperer]

Yeah, snow mentioned skeleton shrimp as a possible ID, early on. I brought them up as a possible means of biological control. I mentioned snow by name because it was previously briught up, andI don't intend to come across as a know it all, asshole. Which, I imagine, I sometimes do.

[banasophia]

39 minutes ago, Snow_Phoenix said:

Yeah, I meant they *might be skeleton shrimp (this was before getting clearer pics) but I think Ray is right - these appear to be hydroids. I didn't know that skeleton shrimp could be used to munch on hydroids until Ray mentioned it. That was new info for me. 

As for a sea hare, try not to use one. They poop a LOT (at least the species my LFS brings in on a regular basis does) and grow fairly big. I'm uncertain if wrasses eat hydroids. As far as I know, they prefer pods. 

Agree, sea hares do definitely poop a lot... and they are big turds too. Haha!!! 

20 minutes ago, RayWhisperer said:

Yeah, snow mentioned skeleton shrimp as a possible ID, early on. I brought them up as a possible means of biological control. I mentioned snow by name because it was previously briught up, andI don't intend to come across as a know it all, asshole. Which, I imagine, I sometimes do.

Not at all... I was just getting confused about whether we were talking organism ID or control. Always on the lookout for how to control hydroids, since they do heavily populate my tank!!!

 

Not sure about other types of wrasse, but I’ve been told the yellow coris wrasse specifically may work and may be suitable for my tank. 

[Pezking182]

Not for nothing but any chance this is on the OUTSIDE of the tank. The pics of the "veins" look like when paint gets wet and starts to ripple. 

[ReeferND]

@Pezking182 @banasophiathanks for all the help. The veins are definitely something growing on the glass. My next big question is what should I do? Some people say it clears up, just quit feeding the tank.....some say you have to tears the tank down and start over....others say removed rock and sterilize it (since my hydroids are the glass and rock I don't see this doing much other knocking down the population for a moment). I really need some suggestions here, should I take my corals out and scrub them so they live longer? Should I setup a hospital tank and put all life in there and strip the tank down. Should I leave it?

Thanks everyone. I really appreciate all the help

[banasophia]

Well people have suggested less feeding and tear down to me too... but I’ve found that most of my corals are okay. (And I have been pretty shocked by the suggestion to tear it down.) I don’t really have the option to feed less due to my sun corals and mandarin. I am looking into additional ways to keep my nutrients down. 

 

I’ve found that Duncans were sensitive to my hydroids so I don’t keep them anymore; my other corals are doing okay. My tank’s good otherwise and I love it, so I just consider hydroids another inhabitant to take into consideration. Mine are a different type than yours, so what works for me may not work for you.