Bristle worms

There are so many types of worms that if they have any spikes on them, people assume they must be bristleworms. To the person who thinks that bristleworms eat coral, if it was a bristleworm on the coral, maybe he was cleaning off dead parts of the coral. I have plenty of bristleworms and plenty of coral and no problems. I did freak out the first time I saw a bristleworm crawl across my aussie lords, but no damage.

 

amcarrig-- thanks for sparking my intrest and in the process reinforcing a valuable lesson about prejudice. I googled eunicid and fire worm. The pictures I saw of eunicids look a lot like what I remember ravaging my tank. I did a little more digging however and learned even more. For those with an interest in taxonomy...
Kingdom > Animalia anything animal
Phylum > Annelida all the worms
Class > Polychaeta as far as I can all of the marine worms fall under this class and according to Bob Goemans
"In fact, all Polychaetes are usually called 'bristleworms' since they have hair-like projections along their sides, even our beloved fanworms. These hairs are often used for locomotion, yet some dispense a toxin, such as coral eating fireworms (the bad and ugly guys) in the Genera Hermodice and Eunice. Yet, even some of the bad and ugly ones have some value in healthy reef tanks, ..."
Order > many orders within the Class Polychaeta
If your intereseted in more, I found info this on Saltcorner which is listed on the link swap section of 3reef.

So, going by this broad definition of bristleworms, I will no longer claim that they are all evil but there are definately some bad characters in this crew andsome of these are eunicids as amcarrig pointed out.:-[

 

I had no idea that all polycheate worms were called "bristleworms!" I suppose it can all get very confusing to those who have been in the hobby for years and for those who are just starting!

 

I have never had to much problems with any type of worms due to the fact that I have 2 different types of wrasses in my reef aquarium that eat them . I to have never had any problem with them disturbing corals.

 

The simple bottom line truth is if you have to many of any of these worms its the tank keepers fault they will and can only reach plague proportions from being supplied with enough food to grow their populations . Cut out several feeds a day or week and they will die out and starve to death.

 

what types of wrasses will eat these?

 

My six-lined wrasse took care of all of the worms in my tank within a couple days of being put in there.


Six-lined wrasse FTW!

 

Here a worm I pulled out of the tank last week, I was told it was a fire worm. Could this be it guilty one of eating my leather down to rock?

 

That looks more like a eunicid worm to me but I'm not a worrm expert.

 

I'm no worm expert either but that looks a lot like the #$^*! that ate my leather coral.