Amphipods eating all my copepods?

[PIPSTER]

After my tank cycled, I had a good boom of copepods all over my glass. Then, after a while, I noticed some pretty big amphipods showing up in my cheato in my HOB fuge, and some of them crawling on my rock. Not long (maybe a week later), and I noticed I only see maybe 25 copepods on my glass, and I can't see any on my rock or sand. When they peaked, it seemed like the rock and sand were crawling with them. I clean most of the glass daily, but I leave the back glass and about 1\2" above the sand on the glass all around dirty with algae to give them something to eat. The copepods I do have seem grouped around the 3-4 snails that are on the glass.

Are the amphipods eating all my copepods? Or do they just go through boom\bust cycles? I want more copepods!

I have had zero ammonia, nitrites, nitrates, and phosphates since April 1st.

 

[Calappidae]

IME, they go through boom and bust cycles. I know I had an amphipod explosion in my tank with a million of them per rock.. which would come out at night all over the glass. Fast forward a month, looks like they diminished. Could be because they ran out of food to have such a large population, and the copepods were just out competed by the amphipods for food.

 

[AlgaeBarn]

Copepods and Amphipods

Copepods and Amphipods

We have noticed that amphipods tend to consume copepods (one of the reasons we currently do not package them with our product line).

In our experience, it doesnt appear that amphipods and copepods share too similar of food sources. Amphipods tend to consume larger pieces of food while copepods tend to thrive more on live microalgae.

If you aren't keeping your copepod population up through feeding microalgae, then amphipods can wreck your copepod population.

 

[makers marc]

Algae Barn,

On a similar note, I've been keeping a tisbe culture in a 10 gallon tank for 5 months now. I feed it phytofeast every 2-3 days and do 25%-50% water changes weekly.

The past 2 weeks i've noticed tiny little worm like things crawling all over the tank glass. They wiggle when they move, and seem to be laying a bunch of tiny eggs at the water line. Ive researched what it could be and am concluding it is some type of rotifer.

What could this be? If I ensure that I keep feeding enough phyto, can they co-exist? When I harvest to transfer to my 75g display, I try to suction 75% rotifers to keep their population in check. ANy other advice or thoughts?

 

[Umbra]

Amphipods on a whole consume a wide variety of foods depending on species. Some species are actually quite predaceous and will even eat each other if other forms of nutrition are scarce.

Rotifers in turn can be a potential food source for at least some species of copepod, if nothing else they'll either coexist or function as a food source for the pods.

 

[rt67ghy]

The best way to control amphipods is get a fish that'll eat them. I used to see a few in my tank but as they used to move around with the flow my clarki clowns would eat them and now I'm free of amphipods.