You might be correct, thank you. I’ve never seen these in any of my tanks over the years. They seem to be multiplying I have a lot of them. This tank is fairly new so I only have a few frags of Zoas and they seem to bother them a lot at night. Worried they will really bother some sps frags.
This is true but more specifically I'm asking if anyone has any experience with these and if they can bother/smother corals. Seems like they can reproduce rapidly. I've never had them before and from my research it seems they are pretty rare in in the hobby. Thanks.
during the day most of the zoas are open and fine but there are a couple frags that are bothered during the day. At night is when they seem to be most bothered. If it were just a couple of them i wouldn't worry but they are out of control at night. Like the entire tank is filled with swaying hair like tentaclesThey definitely will be feeding on the zooplankton. From my experience with them, they tend to feed dusk and night, so switching your feeding schedule to primarily day time or late morning will also diminish their proliferation. I never had any problem with them actually irritating or damaging my corals. I found they tend to stay on the underside of rocks or plate corals and then progressively come out as it gets dark. I had one from 2013- late 2015 that grew quite large, sweepers over 20" by the end of its time in my tank. Never irritated the plate coral it was on, even when they grew to near the same size. I simply fed the plate coral during the day. Sold both of them in late 2015 as the jelly always attached to the plate underside by morning. I've had far more irritation to my tank inhabitants from vermitid and other filter feeders than I ever had from any of these. They are large, but I found it more as an exciting oddity than a pest problem. I never actively fed them and the populations grew and diminished besides the large main one which was stably hosted by the plate coral. Perhaps they were being consumed by one of my fish/shrimp though.
Attached are some photos of the large comb jelly (my first one) from February 2014 on the plate coral, and the plate coral during the day with the jelly hidden underneath.
Are you finding that the zoas are regressing or lacking proper extension during the day?
The way I see it your options are manual removal and/or reducing available food supply. They only consume via filter feeding, so stopping your zooplankton feeding will certainly help. If it were me, I'd either lower the supply of food and wait, or lower the supply of food and manually remove many of them. I don't see them as a pest but more an organism out of control (like GSP or Xenia) so I would personally be okay with a small number left as long as the population was stable. They are benthic organisms so you should be able to remove their rocks/frag hosts during the day time and remove them from those with no worries. If the rocks are too porous and it's difficult to get to their locations then try once they go out for feeding at night. I would start with the most affected frags first and do a bit at a time. They're a bit tricky to dislodge from rocks because of how narrow they are.
Hi @Kopka , Because I have this creatures in DT tank on few corals I make my research. This one and few other sp which we can find in our DT as a hitchhikers are carnivorous, they feed mainly on zooplankton, some on crustaceans like copepods, small shrimps etc. They can overtake your tank if you use food like that for your fish and corals. So you to be able to reduce them, for some time you have to stop feeding them, or stop introducing some of the foods they eat. No other way to take them, them competitor or predator in that case is Beroe ovata (another type of ctenophores) which feed on them. The other way is like you was think to restart your system
Hi @Crabs McJones , I read about it and isn't that harmless like it look, because like the @Kopka post, it can overtake your tank and to kill your corals only feeding it with most of the type of food we use to feed our corals and fish. it's carnivores and feed on zooplankton, small crustaceans and such. It can infest the tank in no time.
