Hydroid Control?

[Matt_Wandell]

Hello all, curious to see what, if anything, people are using to control hydroids in their well fed NP reef tanks.

I have a 200g 36" cube with Tubastrea and NP gorgonians. Tank is fed daily with Phytofeast, Oysterfeast, Cyclopeeze, Nutramar Ova, as well as target feeds with blended krill, rotifers, and Argent powdered foods. Aiptasia is taken care of quite well by a Chaetodon mitratus. The rocks are mostly covered by micro brittle star arms and sponges, but hydroid growth has started to become pretty heavy in spots.

Any ideas for natural predators? Do you manually remove them? I think if I could find a suitable nudibranch that was a general hydroid predator I could keep it fed indefinitely. The hydroids form thick mats of growth in the overflow box and sump, which pulls off easily and looks like brownish/orange hair algae.

Here's a photo of the type of hydroid I have in spades...
http://www.reefs.org/forums/download/file.php?id=36421

Thanks,
Matt

 

[uhuru]

Sorry, I can't offer any tips, but do you have more pictures of your tank?

I believe the Aquarium of the Pacific in So. Cal has the same issue, and they remove them manually.

 

[Matt_Wandell]

Not any very good ones. Low light=hard to photograph...

But here is one that I used as an avatar.

 

[uhuru]

looks nice even though just a small pic...

 

[aninjaatemyshoe]

I've heard of people using superglue to basically smother them. It gets pretty tedious when you have so many though.

 

[stunreefer]

I've used rigid airline tubing attached to flexible airline tubing and siphoned them out, making sure to suck up all the "roots" as well. Again, VERY tedious as mentioned above.

 

[ourmanflint]

If you're feeling adventurous, I can recommend a couple of butterflyfish for you. My C. falcula has wiped out my ever growing solitary type hydroids ( same as your pic) and my C Kleinii have a taste for the palmate types. They never touch any of my other NPS, Scleronephthea, Chilli Coral and Blueberry Gorgs.