Hydroids - Nuke or not to nuke?

[Alfredo De La Fe]

Ok, so I left my 40 without anything for a LONG time after I lost EVERYTHING from one of my daughters dropping an iron based O2 depletion packet in the tank...

Besides hair algae, which I am pretty close to taking care of... My rock has hydroids all over the place. The kind with the hard tube. Should I nuke the rock with chlorox for an hour? (soak it in tap water with a cup or two of chlorox in it), rinse it out and put back in the tank two rocks at a time or all at once?

I have actually considered nuking my rock before to get rid of some parasitic worms I have had in this tank...

Or will some kind of wrasse or other fish eat them?

I would just nuke the tank, but I have two fish and about 4 small coral frags. No where to keep them until the tank recovers from the nuking.

 

[duke62]

My copperband ate all mine

 

[mikejrice]

I wouldn't nuke all of the maturity you gained out of the tank. Do you have a picture of the hydroids? Never come across a species with a hard tube before.

 

[Alfredo De La Fe]

I nuked all of my rock. Put the rock in clorox and water over night, let it dry 24 hours then pulled out ALL of the live sand. Put the rock back in the tank, took the rock out after two weeks to scrub it, put it back. After another two weeks I took the rock out, siphoned out whatever ditritus and sand was left, added fresh live sand and put the rock back in.

My tank sat for six weeks, allowing the rock to come back to life. I added copepods and was worried about the amphipods, but turned out I didnt need to worry. Last night I was looking and counted at least a dozen going in and out of the rockwork.

I need to take the rock out again so that I can nicely re-aquascape the tank. Also need to brush off a few spots of hair algae, I waited too long to add the cleanup crew.

The other thing I did was get a NEW RO/DI six stage. Only using this water and also I am changing 15% of the water weekly at this point...

 

[salpet]

how big of a tank do you have ,it seems like you did a lot of work in order to remove hair algae, the water changes should take care of the rest ,and if it still persists try dosing with wodka

 

[Alfredo De La Fe]

It is a 40 breeder. Unfortunately I shut down my 180...

No, I nuked the tank because I had nasty hydroids and parasitic worms. The tank needed a reboot anyway, my daughters a few years ago decided to feed the fish and dropped chemical packets in the water. It killed almost everything and no matter what I did stuff just wouldn't thrive.

Now I am getting hair algae, but it is because I killed off all of the coraline and did not have an adequate cleanup crew. It is only on certain rocks.

 

[Burbarry]

So acid wash the rocks?

 

[Alfredo De La Fe]

I used clorox and water. It is a denaturer and meant there would be a shorter cycle.

 

[SantaMonica]

It will take a year or two for the periphyton to grow back on the rocks, and then it will be good as new.

 

[Alfredo De La Fe]

Biggest problem is that hair algae started growing. In a low nutrient tank, so definitely the rock, need to get coralline to grow back.

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[SantaMonica]

Coralline is part of the periphyton, so it will slowly grow back if nutrients are kept low in the water.

 

[Alfredo De La Fe]

Spent several hours yesterday scrubbing the rock. Fortunately it is coming off very quickly AND there is a lot of coralline algae starting to grow on the rock, so should not have a hair algae recurrence.

Going this route was a LOT of work, but I have no nasty hitchhikers and otherwise everything is healthy (coralline is growing so fast I can barely keep up with scrapping the front glass!)

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