red and black reef worm....looks like a centipede

[jgoal55]

I saw in my tank tonight a worm that looked a lot like a centipede. He was about 2 1/2 inches long and was half black and half red...any ideas what this could be? Is it bad?

Also, someone sent me a link one time that had pictures of a bunch of worms....can someone send me something like that again please???

Thanks,
Jorge

 

[wbholwell]

uh, bristleworm? I think there's one harmful variety, but that isn't it. Perfectly fine in a reef tank.

 

[FutureInterest]

It's all good. It's just a bristleworm, and they're beneficial.

 

[matttvi]

Hey, I don't know who took this picture, but did it look like this thing?

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if so, then no worries, as stated, it is a harmless bristle worm and a wonderful detrius eater...

 

[contender]

I love my bristleworms! Cool looking and interesting to watch. I have one that lives under my blue xenia and comes out every afternoon.

 

[xyzpdq0121]

Yep bristle worm, jorge... Fun to watch good eattin' if your fish get it or you cook it with some garlic butter... All around a good thing

 

[jgoal55]

hey guys,

thanks for the responses....that was exactly it in the picture above...cool looking thing...glad to hear its not harmful....

is there a site that has a library of pics so you can identify worms, etc?

 

[budsreef]

Wet Web Media

 

[victor626nj]

wow i have these same worms in my set up but i have nothing but lr in my set up i was scared it was something bad that hitchhiked in my rock

 

[dough]

I had one bristleworm that was about 10" long at one time.

 

[siege]

I have too many for my tastes, but that will change as my tank stabilizes further, as my banded coral shrimp matures, and if I ever add a 4/6-line Wrasse or pseudochromis.

Just be glad it's not a

>Bobbit Worm</a> - so named because the female bites the reproductive parts off of the male to feed to her young... :yawn: http://www.monblog.ch/optimiste/?p=200604021444406">More info here</a>.

Though I can't find the post again, I saw photos from a guy who had found an 18' worm of some kind (not bobbit) living in the pvc rock stand under the sand in his tank. It was apparently making appearances only late at night every few months to nibble on corals... He said he'd been having the periodic coral recession for about 2 years when it finaly started happening more and more often and becoming worse and worse before he finally found the worm and had to dismantle the tank in order to take the rock frame out to get at the bugger...

Ew. :sick:

 

[victor626nj]

yeah i think i read that two i think it was on melvs reef

 

[xyzpdq0121]

Ya, once a bristle worm gets over 6"-7", it can start being a problem. I would remove anything over that but leave the smaller one.

 

[siege]

brad;36819 wrote: I think you are talking about Steve Weast's tank... go to http://www.OregonReef.com">www.OregonReef.com</a> and click on "The Worm Incident"[/QUOTE]

No, this was it. I guess I was doing o.k. to get all the details but that (admittedly important) one. I imagine I saw a reference to stupidly long worm somewhere else and just mixed them up. Nightmarish, regardless.

 

[jjw]

Well, I used to think bristle worms are harmless till last week. I received 3 zoa frags, 2 immediately opened up, the Fire and Ice just stayed shut. Close inspection revealed it has a bristle worm living inside the small porous rock it came on with. Over the week, the polys just mushed away. Tonight I saw the bristle worm - which had moved to a bigger rock nearby - used his head to cover the last already withered polyp, and sucked it dry. I was able to observe it at such a close range I could see the tiny vein in the tip of its head turning red each time it sucks up the juice from the poor polyp. So there goes my $20 frag. Too bad I didn't take picture of that.

 

[siege]

Hm... I need a place to build an, oh... 300gal aquarium only 18" tall with a stupid ly deep sandbed, with big separating partitions and stock it with nothing but pseudochromis, 4- and 6-line wrasses and banded coral shrimp and give them nothing but bristleworms to eat with a minimum of supplementary krill, mysid shrimp, etc. to ensure they're fully healthy.

The question is, how do you mass-farm bristleworms in such a way that they are easily caught in large number on a regular basis?

 

[jjw]

bristle worm trap! I have to research on how to do one, I have to get that bad boy out.

 

[siege]

Yeah, it seems to be a mixed debate on the bristleworms. I imagine it has a lot to do with several things, like the fact that there is at least one well known one that eats corals, and well... It's a kind of nasty looking little thing. Also, an excess</em> of bristleworms, both in size and number is an indicator that there is something wrong in your tank, i.e., you are over-feeding, or having die-off somewhere you haven't noticed, an excess of detritus, etc. etc. etc..
Personally, I wouldn't mind a few, but I have too many, I think, for my tastes, and some of them are starting to get big, but in my case we're also recovering form an accident that caused a lot of die-off that I couldn't really clean-up so well (long story, posted in these forums elsewhere in bits and pieces), and the population I have is just a result of that error. As things slowly calm down in my tank and things stabilize and clean up, their numbers will lower, I am certain. However, I would like to thin their population as much as possible (knowing it's also effectively impossible to completely eradicate them in a reef tank without flat nuking it... bleach, anyone?), and it's a good excuse to get a pseudochromis or 4/6-line wrasse