this has all be covered befor by Greenbean
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not to be ignorant---but you people are WRONG. bristleworms are scavengers in ideal conditions, but when they do not have enough to scavenge, they have to resort to other measures in order to eat.
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Well, sort of. The term bristleworms covers all of the polychaetes and they have all sorts of feeding habits, so you can't really make generalizations like that. It's kind of like me saying bristleworms are filterfeeders because tube worms are bristleworms too.
SOME bristleworms such as the eunicids are scavengers in good times but become predatory in lean times. However, that type of feeding is far from the norm with polychaetes. The vast majority are harmless regardless of how much food is available.
Amphinomids, aka fireworms (the ones with calcium bristles) are completely harmless with the exception of one coral eating species which is extremely rare in the hobby. Regardless of how little food there is or how large they get they are always scavengers. They find their food by smell and they do not recognize healthy tissue as food.
Recommending that people take out all the bristleworms they see is pretty ill-conceived IMO.
and again by Greenbean
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well then, why is it that i have observed firewoms eating healthy tissue?
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I think you would be hard pressed to show that the worm was an amphinomid and that the tissue was healthy. If you did, it would contradict years of research on these worms, and you would have some pretty groundbreaking research on your hands.
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In all reality, anything is possible as behaviors change in a captive situation.
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They can only change as much as physiology allows. Being in captivity doesn't change how they find food, which is by smell. If you were stripped of your senses except for smell and a much simpler sense of touch, I could let you loose in an apple orchard and you would starve to death surrounded by potential food just because you have no way of knowing it's there. It works the same way with fireworms. Decomposing animals give off characteristic compounds that these worms respond to. If those compounds aren't there the worms don't respond and don't eat.
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and to the best of my knowledge, the term bristleworm does not cover all polychate annelids, but the term polychaete annelids does cover all bristleworms.
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Polychaete translates to many bristles. It covers all bristleworms. The hobby didn't invent the term bristleworm.
and again by Greenbean
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his reply was that a clam under 3" can be attacked by bristle worms even if its healthy(he has had it happen a few times but says it very rare in aquaria settings)
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No doubt there are some polychaetes that will go after healthy clams, but those will go after clams regardless of what size and none of them are fireworms. There are lots of things wrong with a statement like that. Chief among them is how in the world would he know that the clam was healthy? People assume you can look at animals and judge whether or not they are healthy, which isn't true in probably the majority of cases. There is no way to look at a clam externally and tell that it's healthy. They only make it clear sometimes that they are unhealthy before they die. Since he only thinks that the worms attack clams under 3'' that would suggest to me that the clams are starving to death. Under 3'' they don't make enough food from photosynthesis alone, and there is no outward sign that they are starving.
