Potential LPS & Acan Pests unveiled. BIG JAWS. Must See!!!

[Alpha Aquaculture]

Ok finished with this piece. The worm got cut up into a bunch of segments. Plus there were baby Bobbit worms... pics getting uploaded now...

 

[alex garcia]

same things happened with my acans that i got from aquatic auction and found one of those worms eating from the inside of my ppe frag , the polyp closed and when i took it out the worm came out and the polyp was just a shell and the inside was mush

 

[Alpha Aquaculture]

Thanks for joining my discussion Alex! I have seen the same thing as you describe with my yumas. It almost looked like the yuma was eating the worm like spegetti. Not the case. The worm was coming in through the yumas mouth looking for a snack on mesenterial filaments. In that case the worm was a standard bristleworm. Even standard bristleworms can be eating your corals!

 

[Alpha Aquaculture]

Here is the acan, just a lil closed cuz corals around it were being moved so it could easily be grabbed. The Bobbit worm was eating the acans around it not this piece tho

Here are two throught the bottom of the tank glass shots where you can see the Bobbit worm moving around, this is how I initally found this worm, at night inspecting the bottom of the tank with a flashlight

Here is a shot of the underside of the colony out of the water before any cutting. The Bobbit is clearly visible

Immediately after begining the cut the worm was severed and a piece of it starting moving around all erratically on the saw table, beware there is much more worm in the rock... correction worms

Here you can see a piece of the worm sticking out of one of the frags. When I pulled it out it made that spegetti slurp sound, lol

Here is a baby Bobbit in the bucket with the frags

Closeup of another baby I pulled from one of the frags

Finally a shot of all of the worm fragments and baby, it was a bigun!

 

[daninfamous]

Those things are hidious! Dipping wont kill them? Only cutitng em up?

 

[Lowsingle]

Hi Alpha, thanks for the article...this is the first time I read it (I must have missed it before). Do you still have the melting events in your tank? Have you determined a good solution? I have totally given up keeping acans after I lost so many beautiful corals......I will only get back into them if someone finds a good solution that doesn't involve manual removal as I keep all of my corals in a display tank and can't remove them regularly. Thanks for the info.....

cheers,
Darren

 

[brahm]

hmm, I'm going to have to keep an eye out. I picked up a bunch of acans from austin last month, all are doing really well with the exception of 1 piece. With a quick glance everything lookd fine happy puffy polyps, but when I looked around the side you can see a couple polyps pulling from the skeleton. Then last week I noticed one of the smaller polyps on the underside of the piece started to get a white jelly coating over it.

I took the piece out dipped it in revive for about 20 mins (which really ticket it off), I then frag off the white covered polyp and the 2 nearest polyps, relocated the main piece in an easier to feed spot, and moved the frag to the other side of the tank away from all the acans (which isn't far in a 20" tank). I was able to blow off most of the white jelly, with it went most of the damaged polyp. So far the main colony appears unaffected and ate readily that nite although it took a few hours for it to recover from the revive dip.

The 2 polyps that were on the frag w/the white jelly don't appear to be looking to hot right now. I may move them to another location. I didn't however see any pests in the revive water...although the coral looked so stressed when I took it out I didn't spend much time focusing on the bucket.

 

[stedfast82]

cool thank's for the info.

 

[mgny]

Very Intresting Alpha. I have lost some acans recentlty. I purchased a few1 ployp frags a while back from Cherry Corals. Yukis was the first. The frags were placed in the display and never moved. Yukis grew to 10 polyps in a year or so and all the others did well too. A few months ago i noticed them declining. All other corals in my 180 looked great. My conclusion from talking to others was my water was to clean, thats why my sps do so well . i was skeptical so i dipped them in interceptor and tmpcc with no change. Your findings i hope are the problem. Gonna cut up whats left to see if there are any critters inside. Was at the Manhattan swap this weekend and was tempted by some amazing acans but had to resist. Hopefully you are on to something. Mike

 

[PR_Reefers]

So what ever happened with this? I'm thinking I might have the same problem. Any other findings or a better solution?

 

[Alpha Aquaculture]

Thanks for the replies everyone! I've gotta get some updates on here soon. We are about to frag up all our corals into individual polyps and will be doing a major worm check during the process. We do go through the coral tanks and dip and remove worms regularly as a preventative measure now.

 

[jarred1]

Have you figured out away to get rid of those worms without having to cut up the whole colony?


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[reefknight]

Very interesting write up. I had about six acan colonies all from the same source. They began dying off slowly, polyps receeding from the out side to the center. I only have two of these left now both missing polyps. I'll have to try and dip and look for worms. Never thought about this, I was guessing it was a light/ flow issue.

 

[Braves Fan]

Interesting read Sounds like these worms are going to be hard to get rid of as the worms are in the corals and not crawling around the outsides of the corals where a coral dip could get to them. Might end up that there will be no answer in getting rid of them. Looking foward to updates on this.

 

[FMF0331]

...

Just noticed a few of my acans were receding. Gonna have to pull them out tomorrow and inspect them a little closer

 

[Shamus]

Any updates on this Acan problem? I am having the same issues and just wanted to know if anybody found a cure.