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Bad? Good? Indifferent?

I'll snap a pic of it tonight but I'm mildly concerned about it. They started appearing when I added margarita and turbo snails to the tank and originally i thought they were snail excrement. That is until the other day when I was investicating them and they all had their heads out By heads, I mean that they had little fan like fingers flowing in the current coming out of one end. They're relatively tiny. I'd say the width of the lead from a mechanical pencil (.5mm-.9mm) and range from 1/8" to a little less than half an inch long for the longest one. I've only ever seen their heads once. Anyone know what these are?

On a side note, I started my marine tank experiment with a 29 gal and when I moved back in april, I converted my 46. Upon cleaning out the old 29, I had to clean these same type of white spots/wormlike things and they're HARD! I had to get a glass scraper to clean them off.

Sounds like the feather dusters I have. I am no expert, by any means, but if I were guessing that's what you have. Do you have feather dusters?

-Josh

Well... if they are featherdusters then yes lol. If not then not any that I'm aware of lol. But yeah, they kinda do look like em.

If they are tiny spirals they are spirorbids. Mildly annoying little rock hard feather dusters that stick to everything. If they are straight tubes then they are serpulids which usually don't get out of hand unless there are tons of extra nutrients in the water column.

Sham, when you say "Like tiny spirals" with respect to Spirorbids, are you referring to the shape of the tube in which the worms live?

Only some clarification is needed here because I've described Serpulids as having a spiral arrangement of tentacles at the head end, which of course is a different anatomical feature.

Serpulids construct calcareous tubes, and if they do so in the wrong place, this can be a tad annoying, but as far as I understand, it's unusual for them to do this on glass. Usually Serpulid worms (several of which are highly decorative and are sold intentionally at dealers with fairly high price tags) prefer to make their homes in calcareous rock or a coral head. In the wild, they will sometimes set up home on a live coral head, where they will live alongside the coral polyps.

Spirorbids are completely new to me, so I'll have to look these creatures up. I suspect they'll prove to be interesting to research given the above comments.

If Spirorbids are like Serpulids in being filter feeders, and the 'mystery' worms mentioned in the initial post ARE Spirorbids, then presumably they're getting some food, otherwise they would have starved to death fairly quickly. Presumably the messy eating habits of other aquarium inhabitants are contributing to their well being, or they are finding live foods of the appropriate size to feed upon. If the aquarium is connected to a refugium and being supplied with amphipods, copepods and live Brine Shrimp in order to feed something such as a Mandarin Fish then this will keep filter feeding worms happy too.

Just looked up "Spirorbid" and found some interesting pages ...

Someone who is working toward a phylogeny of the Spirorbids and is VERY enthusiastic about these worms

This page describes how Spirorbids are considered pests in Kelp culture facilities

Seems most of these worms remain small, so if your worms DO remain small, and possess coiled tubes instead of linear ones, then you have Spirorbids. Which means they may prove to be fun creatures to scrape off the aquarium glass periodically, because they're pretty rapid colonisers.


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

I don't really think of the top of a feather duster as a spiral. They are a type of feather duster, filter feeding, and have fans like the other species mentioned but while the others build straight tubes and stick out the top the spirorbids build tiny little curling tubes that are stuck sideways or mostly flat to most anything they can. Usually people first mention having white spiral spots on the glass until they look closer and see the feather duster fan sticking out the end. They do stay extremely small but multiply worse than rabbits. I've got a small powerhead I left in the tank for only a few months before upgrading and it was coated in spirorbid shells. It's still got a few left even after scrubbing it.

Ah, in the case of Serpulid worms, the feedng tentacles ARE arranged in a spiral, which marks them out as different from the Sabellid worms that are popularly sold. The decorative Serpulids are called "Christmas Tree Worms" because of the appearance of their feeding tentacles.

Oh I gathered from the page on Japanese kelp culture (which has a photo of a kelp front that is carpeted with Spirorbid worm cases) that they're prolific breeders ...

Do these things also attach themselves to the hulls of ships? Because given their apparent propensity to attach to all kinds of strange surfaces, it would seem to be a possibility. Mind you, the methods available for removing them from a large steel structure are going to be somewhat different from those available to the home aquarist!


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002