Hydroid problem

[CjAmaryllis]

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

 

[ISpeakForTheSeas]

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?

There are some things that eat them, but I wouldn't put any in a tank with thousands of these. Honestly, now that they've eliminated your pod population, I'd just wait them out; hydroid medusae (the jellyfish-esque life stage hydroids) are predatory and feed on things like pods - without a food source, they should starve and disappear. Once they're gone, you should be able to deal with the branching (polyp life stage) hydroids.

 

[CjAmaryllis]

There are some things that eat them, but I wouldn't put any in a tank with thousands of these. Honestly, now that they've eliminated your pod population, I'd just wait them out; hydroid medusae (the jellyfish-esque life stage hydroids) are predatory and feed on things like pods - without a food source, they should starve and disappear. Once they're gone, you should be able to deal with the branching (polyp life stage) hydroids.

Okay, thank you! I will just avoid adding anything for now and instead focus on setting up the quarantine tank.. Lesson learned! Glad I can learn the hard way the importance of quarantine before anything got hurt.