Pix & ID: Critters that come in your rocks: the good and the bad.

[SushiGirl]

Techne, they are probably copepods.
No, bassguy, they aren't bad.

[bassguy]

sweet, thanks for the quick response!

[oblongshrimp]

man there are some creepy look critters out there. These pictures have helped me ID a couple of my own creepy critters

[Reef1121]

@Techne what your observing is more than likely copepods and the bigger ones are amphipods. Its perfectly normal and is good. They eat bacteria and other things in the water column. Certain fish also eat them (wrasses, gobies, blennies, manderin, some file fish) Please by no means go out and get a Manderin, they will eat the entire population within at least a month and then starve to death. THose fish are best left in the ocean or to expert reefers/ aquariums.

[Gibbnal]

How about this little guy? He moves a lot faster than any of my snails and I only catch him out in the middle of the night.

[StephLionfish]

Gibbnal, Stomatella snail. Good guy.

[Reef1121]

My cleaner shrimp hunts my stomatella snails at night, its quiet interesting to watch

[SushiGirl]

Yeah, we had a cleaner shrimp that ate all our stomatellas in our display, including our huge orange "Stomazilla" -- I was ticked. Later, we saw the shrimp go over, grab a cerith, rip it out of its shell, and run off to eat it. The shrimp died 2 days later. Karma.

[thebkramer]

Haven't been around in awhile.. I have been popping in & out of the forum though
Just wanted to say...
SO HAPPY TO SEE THIS THREAD!!! and TO SEE IT AS A STICKY!!!!

Awesome !!!!

[Cheney12]

Interesting

[Seagull_3]

Hi all, am new to the forums here - so hi

Have kept Malawi Cichlids for years, but have just taken the plunge & am now cycling my first reef tank.

I have to say - there's a lot more going on in this tank than my African one already (only day 3 with the live rock), and I (obviously) haven't added any fish or corals yet!

Anyway, am just wanting to keep an eye on everything that's going on in the tank until I get a feel for what's good/normal, and what's bad/needs attention.

Something that I noticed just today is this little red growth on one of my rocks (circled in yellow in attached photo). I have no idea what it is, and which camp it belongs to (good/bad). Any hints/tips/insights would of course be much appreciated!

Looking forward to learning lots more over the coming weeks/months/years.

Cheers guys...

[Seagull_3]

I should add, I only noticed it because it looked like it was puffing up, and then blowing something out (although I couldn't see any actual discharge). Looks like some kind of jelly type substance or consistency. It's definitely alive - but doesn't seem to move from it's current position on the rock.

[SushiGirl]

Sorry, Seagull, I can't really tell from that pic.

[larrypoe]

soooooo...headed into my first saltwater venture :/...i have had freshwater aquariums for years...but never salt. from what i have read so far, most of the critters I wanted in the tank are bad and those that were ehhh are good :/. Starfish and urchins....anems (for the clownfish)...shrimp, crabs......all things i was hoping to keep along with a few fish and corals.....grrrr. my first test run is going to be just live sand and limestone (we get some realy cool stuff quarried from ancient reefs around here) and a few fish. I have used the limestone for years in my freshwater setups and some of it even has what i presume are coral exos.

[Sk8r]

larrypoe, if your INTEREST is in the little crawlers, there is absolutely nothing wrong with a specialty tank, if you are able to FEED these creatures. Urchins are interesting fellows, if you have glued down your rockwork (superglue) and don't mind seeing a few zoas or a mushroom taking a ride on the urchin. Sally Lightfoot crabs are cute, ditto arrow crabs, but they're problematic in a reef, or with fish and worms, so, say, if you want a neat variety of ornamental featherduster, they're a bad combo; but then so are fish, with those. The starfish are fine, but they'll starve---don't get a linckia, which ARE reef friendly, unless you have a 3 year old reef with about 200 lbs of rock---they eat rock film, evidently, bacterial stuff. But a starfish in a specialty tank is fine if you can keep it fed.
Just about anything is good in a specialty tank: what we try to warn you about here is things with habits not a good match for a reef or a fish tank: the ocean is huge, but in a small tank, they get back to the same spot too often. If you can keep them separate and keep tossing in food, and can keep their water clean---great!
So if you want to start out with some of those 'unkeepables', neat, so long as you know how to feed them. I had a very nice urchin in a reef, and he behaved pretty well (for an urchin) but he grew like a bandit and I had to find someone with a larger tank---amazing how fast and how big some of these things can get. Sally Lightfoots, so small and amusing, can get the size of a dinner plate, and then they want fish for dinner. And if you can get expired fish at the market (Sally'd be fine with that) and keep the water clean, she'd be a very interesting speciman. So don't take anything we're saying here as a wave-off, just a "some things inconveniently eat each other, or too easily starve in a small tank."

And do note that a refugium (often part of your sump/system) if large enough, can BECOME a speciality tank, even a second display, if you set it up nicely.

[larrypoe]

thanks Sk8r....I have pretty much come to the conclusion that this cant be a 1 tank system lol......there are just too many critters I like that are not compat with each other :/....side note on the refugium, I have a MONSTER cistren under one of the back rooms of the house...closed concrete deal that was built and used long ago to supply water to the house before public water was avalible. I use it currently to supply water to my koi ponds and freshwater tanks as it collects rain water off the roof though pipes to the cistren....if I remove those pipes so its completely closed off from outside water and change it to a saltwater setup would it be ok for a refugium/extra water to cycle though the tanks ??? this thing is prob 8feet wide and 12 or 14feet deep :0. I have 2 wells i could use as a water source for the ponds instead

[Sk8r]

Oh, my, you've got it bad: run with a little system for a while first, so you're familiar with things like 'salt creep' and other problems in a marine system, and get your feet wet---so to speak. Every kind of system has peculiar demands.

[larrypoe]

lol gotcha.........thing is I have had freshwater setups for 30ish years and am pretty tired of the same o same o :/...theres prob a thousand gallons of aquarium here total...the more i venture towards this saltwater stuff though the more I think maybe sticking to the fresh is a better idea......just way too much extra equipment and problems to worry about. spending thousands of dollars on rocks lights skimmers ect ect just isnt going to happen...

[Reefing Newbie]

Are these hydroids of some type? They seem to go away(while not feeding phyto) and come back a few weeks after I get into the routine of feeding phyto(I feed because of a feather duster and all the smaller feather dusters). Also, are they bad? Is there any way to get rid of them, or control them at least?

[Gibbnal]

On the shell of this snail is a new critter I just noticed. He spends equal time on the back wall of the tank and hitch hiking on snail shells. Pretty fast also for something that looks like it is stuck on the wall.

[Reefing Newbie]

Looks like you have an asternia star getting a free ride. Most are harmless, but there is a species that have a taste for coral though.

[SushiGirl]

Reefing newbie, I can't tell from that pic whether those are small aiptasia or hydroids because I can't see the base. Are they in a kind of tube looking base? If so, you have the same hydroids I have, which haven't really spread very much.

+1 on the asterina star ID for Gibbnal.

[Reefing Newbie]

They do have a round base. Also can't be aptasia as my peppermint shrimp loves them too much to let them grow that much. You are lucky yours aren't spreading SushiGirl! I found out afer I posted that they are now on another rock. They were only located on the rock I pictured above for the past few months. I used to have them in a gigantic cluster, wish I still had a picture to show you.

[Seagull_3]

Hi all, last night whilst looking around in my new tank (only on day 6 of cycling), I noticed for the first time some type of tiny little crab crawling around on the live rock. I tried to catch it with my little claw grabber, but it got away & found a new hiding spot somewhere out of sight. It was quite well disguised & looked to have some sort of fine grass growing on top of it.

I know that as a general rule crabs are bad, but do I need to be worried about this at this stage? Obviously there's no fish in there yet, and I have no idea which type of crab this might be & how big it might eventually become. I guess if it does get much bigger it will become easier to catch. I just wanted to know if there's anything I should be trying to do at this stage, or if it's fine to just let it go for now. Who knows what else is hiding in there at the moment anyway...

[SushiGirl]

Reefing, mine came in on the original rock, which has been in there a year now. I noticed the other day there are a few on another rock now. So they're spreading, just not fast.

Seagull, you can try trapping it, which you'll probably want to do since it sounds hairy. Take a clean glass and put a piece of food in the bottom, and tilt it against the rock you saw it go into. It'll crawl in but can't crawl out. Or you can use a bottle trap. Once you get it out, you can take good pics of it & get an ID.