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Coral Vue Hydros

Amphipod predators that are sexy shrimp and bumble bee shrimp safe.


rkum19

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Started noticing my zoas closed up then noticed several amphipods crawling around them. Lost a small colony of Darth Muals to them. Decided to get 3 sexy shrimp and 2 bumble shrimp. Noticed they hunt them all day even throughout the night, also my clowns will eat them. Problem is they aren't keeping up with the growth and population so they are now attacking more of my zoas. I'm looking for an amphipod predator that is shrimp safe. So wrasse are definitely out of the question. 

 

Here are my current thoughts:

-3 more sexy shimp and one more bumble shrimp 🙂 I love them.

-green spotted Manderan goby, I heard they will eat the small ones. (I would eventually give away or donate back to aquarium as I only have 10 gallon )

-Scotter blenny

-shark nose neon goby

-coral banded shrimp. Not sure how they will do with other smaller shrimp

-cleaner shrimp

 

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I'm not aware of any fish that don't eat amphipods....sounds like your tank is having an issue to have that many of them.

 

Can you tell us some about your system?

 

What do you feed and how much/how often?

 

How is it filtered and cleaned?

 

How old is your tank?

 

What are your more recent test results for the Big 5?  (ca, alk, mg, no3, po4)

 

Tell us everything interesting or unusual that's happened too.  😁

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12 hours ago, mcarroll said:

I'm not aware of any fish that don't eat amphipods....sounds like your tank is having an issue to have that many of them.

 

Can you tell us some about your system?

 

What do you feed and how much/how often?

 

How is it filtered and cleaned?

 

How old is your tank?

 

What are your more recent test results for the Big 5?  (ca, alk, mg, no3, po4)

 

Tell us everything interesting or unusual that's happened too.  😁

Thank you for your response. My tank info below. Other than the bloom in amphipods my tank is doing well several corals have grown, mushrooms have multiplied. only thing that really coincides with the bloom is less algae and less feeding. I had a red slime cyanobacteria problem and algae issues. So I reduced my feeding and started feeding more varieties to my fish, now they eat everything.  also my corals have started growing more and have started to really color up especially my mushrooms and zoas. I attached a pic below sorry if its to blue.

 

My Tank IM nuvo 10 gallon AIO

protein skimmer: forget name but its working really well.

Water change 60% once a week

Tank age: 2 and half years old

Tank water Levels: Calc 440ppm , Mag 1400 ppm,  ALK 8-9 dKH, salinity 1.025 - 1.027, Temp 78 degrees F

Lights: Kessil 160WE - runs 7hrs a day

Feeding: 3-4 days week , usually once every 2 days.  pellets, frozen mysis, flakes, occasional live brine

Fish: 2 clown - 1 onyx Picasso , 1 black storm cloud

inverts: 3 sexy shrimp, 2 bumble, 5 hermits, 3 nasarrius, 2 margarita

other inverts: mini maxi carpet (sexy shrimp and bumble bee hangout spot), several rock flower anemones

Corals: zoas, digi sps, acan lords, Yuma ricordeas, favia, 

 

 

IMG-0437.jpg

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  • 3 weeks later...

I suggest getting a red light, some long bamboo skewers and go hunting during the night.  It isn't difficult to find the big ones and smoosh them with the skewer.   I have to do that every few months.  

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My clowns don’t bother with amphipods... I think amphipods were the reason my zoas are gone. ;( I have a very large number of them... I think they are eating my copepods (their population seems to be going down) I would like to reduce my amphipod numbers. Following for sure

 

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  • A two-year old (young)
  • 10 Gallon tank (small)
  • with a maxed out fish population (two clownfish)
  • with almost no algae cleanup crew (2 margaritas)
  • and a ton of light (A160 on a 12"H tank)
  • an excessive scavenger crew (13 snails, shrimp and crabs)

...is a tough row to hoe, so to speak.   I don't know if you were trying to make it hard on you, but that's the result.

 

Algae issues would fall squarely onto your shoulders.  You have to worry about all those scavengers finding enough to eat.

 

Incidental/hitchhiker scavengers like amphipods are being forced to compete hard for resources.

 

The fact that you reduced food inputs on top of that is causing A LOT of pressure on those scavengers.

 

IMO, remove all of the non-herbivore snails, all but one or two Nassarius snails, and all of the crabs.

 

My guess is that with reduced competition for food resources the amphipods will resume normal behavior (ie mostly unseen from hour to hour) in short order.

 

Population booms are normal in an over-fed environment....even on the micro-level.  It's MUCH harder to come back from being over fed it than it was to get there.  

 

Every organism in your reef from bacteria on up is designed for conservatism and recycling with respect to nutrients....so you're literally fighting the whole system (including the amphipods you grew) to make it different now.

 

Here's an interesting study where they looked at a similar issue in nature, focusing on three successively larger forms of life:

Response of heterotrophic bacteria, autotrophic picoplankton and heterotrophic nanoflagellates to re-oligotrophication

 

Nobody goes back willingly.

 

LIGHTS

Are you running the Kessil on a controller with sunrise/sunset or are you running it on a timer at one intensity level all day?

 

If you have sunrise/sunset capability you should consider getting a lux meter and using it to tune DOWN the intensity so you can run them 12 hours a day, but maybe even cut the level of intensity.  The light meter would also be a good idea if you're just using a basic timer to turn the light off and on, just so you know what intensity you're blasting the tank with.  FYI, you could probably run this tank on an A80.

 

On 3/8/2020 at 3:52 PM, rkum19 said:

only thing that really coincides with the bloom is less algae and less feeding.

Food reduction is the most significant clue to the amphipods and zoanthids story so far.  

 

They are known both as algae eaters and as detritus eaters.  

 

IMO the zoanthids you lost were borderline for some reason (compared to your olther corals which are still fine, correct?) and were, for our discussion and for the amphipods, effectively detritus.

 

IMO don't worry about this too much.  What's done is done.  And it's a "problem" that will ultimately take care of itself since you've corrected the original problem of too much food/too much uneaten food.

 

FOOD

If it helps, you could easily shift to once a week feedings for relatively mature clownfish.  

 

If you're feeding them 4+ days per week, the feedings should be quite small.  It would be difficult to do this with frozen food cubes.  A frozen plate of food can be shaved to allow SMALL portions.  (Or just feed less times per week.)

 

Flake food is difficult to do portion control on....every pinch is different.  I would be VERY conservative with it.

 

 

On 3/8/2020 at 3:52 PM, rkum19 said:

Water change 60% once a week

Sounds like a fairly aggressive cleaning regime.

 

If you aren't monitoring nitrates of phosphates, then I would say to play it more conservative on the cleaning.

 

 

On 3/24/2020 at 7:07 PM, Wingy said:

smoosh

On 3/24/2020 at 7:48 PM, Hami said:

amphipods were the reason

 

It would be cool to see a video of amphipods in the act of eating corals someday.  (The only carnivorous amphipods that seem to show up on a Google search are from the Arctic.)

 

With evidence there would be at least a chance of investigating the circumstances or identifying the amphipod in question.  

 

So far every account of something like what you guys describe happening is either apocryphal or adds up to an environmental problem that caused the coral and amphipod population both to be tweaked.

 

Just for another anecdote: I've had literal swarms of amphipods and copepods in a coral-only tank and nothing else in there had any trouble, including zoanthids, mushrooms and SPS.

 

According to hobby hearsay, amphipods are mostly detritus/algae eaters and aren't really equipped to eat chunks out of a living coral.   Healthy corals can probably eat amphipods, in fact.  😉

 

Here's an interesting paper that Dr Walter Adey (Dynamic Aquaria co-author; inventor of commercial algae scrubbers) was involved with back in 1981:

The effect of micrograzers on algal community structure in a coral reef microcosm

 

That's extremely typical of amphipods that show up in our tanks.

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