Well I had a Bort and Matt come down for the day and as we are checking out the tank at night we see a strange creature lurking in our presence:
As we watch it, it seems like it keeps going, and going, and going...like it just wont stop. Then we see the face of this monster which will provide me nightmares for many nights to come.
After researching a little we come to the conclusion that we feel it is a Eunicid worm, much like what Steve Weast experienced. After reading up a little bit it was noted that they, at least in Steve's experience, witnessed it chowing down on ricordia, xenia, and other soft corals (funny how we found him right by my ricordia). It was also noted that some species would attach clams...of which I had two clams mysteriously die on me within the past month after showing no signs of being ill. Although I cannot obviously pinpoint this worm to doing any real damage that I saw I figured it would be better to take him out then let him roam free.
Of course this guy wasnt in the easy rock he had to be on the very base rock of the whole left side of my structure...which means tomorrow I will spend my day re-aquascaping my whole tank because I cannot get the rocks back together now. After finally getting the rock out we did a fresh water dip which caused him to come plummeting out of the rock...this is what we found! Although not nearly as big as many still enough to put a little scare in me.
The Guilty party (at my apartment it goes guilty until proven innocent but we didnt allow him to even try to prove his case):
Roughly a half inch thick:
And roughly 4 Jimmy Deans Sausages or 15 inches which ever unit of measure you are more comfortable with:
None the less the last few hours of my night have included fishing this guy out of my tank. Now of course because I was to scared to let him continue in my tank I now have to reaquascape everything tomorrow...of course it comes after me finally being content with how everything was growing in on my tank.