Peter Eichler
New member
Pods don't eat Zoanthids you say! For those of you that haven't heard of this or experienced it, I though it was crazy as well. But after months of trying to figure out why some of my colonies were being slowly eaten by something and many lights out observations of nothing but pods crawling on the affected colonies I started to think it wasn't such a crazy idea. I even went so far as buying a healthy colony of palys similar to the ones that seemed to be a favorite snack of the pods. Within a day the pods were crawling on the new colony and polyps were starting to look ragged and soon disappearing.
So in order to immediately cut down on the pod population and in particular the ones on and in the rocks I decided to do a dip. The dip is nothing more than tank water with an extremely high carbonate hardness (20+). Once dipped the pods will flee the rock and moments later act stunned. You only have to dip and swirl for a very short period of time and the pods will drop off like flies.
A week later I found a mandarin I liked to help control the pod population (pick the pod eater of you choice) and everything seems good so far. Polyps are no longer disappearing and some of my RPEs are even starting to show new polyps. I'm assuming that in the long term you'll need something to keep the pod population lower, but it's possible with a couple dips that the pod population would be lowered enough to prevent the pods from needing to find an alternative food source (your zoas and palys).
I hope this will help someone out there, but sadly it's not going to do much for people that have mostly frags and small colonies that are being attacked. Though in theory you could dip larger rocks that don't have zoas on them to reduce the pod population. This also works for unwanted crabs and shrimp.
So in order to immediately cut down on the pod population and in particular the ones on and in the rocks I decided to do a dip. The dip is nothing more than tank water with an extremely high carbonate hardness (20+). Once dipped the pods will flee the rock and moments later act stunned. You only have to dip and swirl for a very short period of time and the pods will drop off like flies.
A week later I found a mandarin I liked to help control the pod population (pick the pod eater of you choice) and everything seems good so far. Polyps are no longer disappearing and some of my RPEs are even starting to show new polyps. I'm assuming that in the long term you'll need something to keep the pod population lower, but it's possible with a couple dips that the pod population would be lowered enough to prevent the pods from needing to find an alternative food source (your zoas and palys).
I hope this will help someone out there, but sadly it's not going to do much for people that have mostly frags and small colonies that are being attacked. Though in theory you could dip larger rocks that don't have zoas on them to reduce the pod population. This also works for unwanted crabs and shrimp.
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