Unexplained clam deaths...Explained!!!

COreefer

COreefer

Premium Member
Tonight that is. 2 weeks ago I lost my fastest growing maxima. I wondered why it had died and tonight I found out why. Right now I am so mad...Oh well hopefully others can learn from my experience. Forget the pyram snails, this will wipe your clam out over night. A nasty flatworm that came with some rock I guess. Here are some pics.

First the clam. Does anyone think it has any hope? I cleaned it up some and since it was still responding I placed it back in the tank.
 
Here is the culprit, fortunately he tried to hide in a small rock and I could pick it up easily...Man I am fuming!
 
One more pic of this crap on the rock I took it out on...This thing has cost me $150 in clams...Man I am bummed.
 
I don't know but there must be more of these because when I woke up this morning my B&W was cleaned out...I am now down to 4 clams all of the sudden. Does anyone have any idea of what is going on? I am beginning to get frustrated. Should I use flatworm exit to kill these suckers?
 
I caught the polyclad flatworm in the act. The area that the flatworm was munching on was the only part of the clam deteriorating. When I took the clam out and flatworm I put them into different containers. The flatworm was in a rock at the time. I then moved he flatworm into the container with the clam to see what its reaction would be. As soon as I did this the worm went immediately for the clam.

I would have taken pics of the worm eating the clam but my primary concern was to remove the worm and not let it get away. I'm almost 100% that the clam was healthy and by the worm eating on it, the clam succumbed to the stress. In the picture you can see how much of the clam was eaten. Maybe some of the mysterious clam deaths can be attributed to this worm. I am trying to bait out other individual worms with a scallop..
 
We get many of those in on ORA grown pieces...I always remove them. You may want to try finding "Dustin" from ORA and ask him about those. Wish I was more help.
 
I have never seen them harm a clam, for that matter I have never seen them eat anything. If I had to guess what they eat I would say sponges, tunicates or some other cryptic animal. Many flatworms are very specific when it comes to their food, the fact that these guys can live in a system without clams probably tells us something. Next time I see one I will try to offer it a baby clam and see what happens.
 
I found one of those things inside my filter sock the other day - freaked me out! Looked and moved like something out of the movie "The Blob" Would like to have an ID also.
I only have one squamosa clam - he's doing fine. Hope there aren't more of them in there..........
 
Thats kind of what I was alluding to earlier....they come in to us from time to time on the ORA pieces...and the health of ORA's clams and other goodies is second to none. I've a sneaky suspicion some other critter had bother or damaged the clam in question and the flatworm was merely cleaning up some free food :) Of course, I've been wrong a million times this year alone! :)

Peace, and thanks for the help Dustin.

-Bryan
 
i am glad you got he worm out, just keep an eye on your other clams and make sure it didn't reproduce.
 
I'm almost 100% that the worm is the culprit. I watched him eating on seemingly a healthy clam. You can see in the pic where the worm did its damage...the back end of the clam seemed fine and the clam was still alive when I puled it out. I have had 2 different reputible sources confirm that its a potential clam eater. Including a positive ID using Calfo and Fenner's Reef Invert book. Now what i need to figure out is how to bait more of these things out.

The fact that all 3 of these clam deaths have occured at night, and the fact that the worm only comes out at night also gives credibility to the worm as the perp.
 
Calfos book lists it as a clam predator but doesnt offer any information to back that up. Just that it is patterned like a squamosa clam. I introduced a couple of these guys to a tank that has several croceas and a squamosa today. After looking around the tank a little more and turning over a bunch of zoanthid broodstock rocks I found half a dozen more large worms in the 4" range. The clams have been mixed with them for quite some time and we havent lost a single one.
I am not going to tell you that your clams didnt get eaten by it. I do think that if these things did eat clams I would have seen it by now, and there would certainly be some more documented cases of it. For now I would put them in the same category of bristleworms, they once had a bad wrap for eating clams too, now people know better.
 
Do you have any tonga nassarius snails in the tank? They eat clams in a similar fashion.

joe
 
The Tonga nassarius eat live clams? I have like 5 of these in my tank for clean up. I have never heard anything about these snails being predatory, you got anymore info?

Should I be feeding these to my Mantis???
 
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