Hydra in my fry tank

Well my accidental spawning fry are 11 days old now and were doing quite well up to a couple of days ago

I found 3 dead on Christmas day and the numbers have slowly been dropping up till then. I've shone a torch on them and can only see lovely silver/green gossamar colours shining back at me, no sign of velvet. This morning one of my bigger ones ___ has a clamped tail although still eating.

I was looking through topics on diseases and noticed about the Hydra. Well I looked at pics of this and oh my goodness I have these on the big pebbles in my tank!

Could this be what is killing my fry? What do I do? I'm guessing I'll have to rip the tank apart and sterilise it all again, but what do I do with the fry in the mean time? I have 7 other tanks running so I can put the fry in a breeding net for now into one of the other tanks, probably the newest one which was set up yesterday. Its had the filter in a cycled tank for a week and I've put some gravel the gravel in as well so it shouldn't be too bad for them. There are only some male juvie guppies in there at present.

If I do get rid of it, won't it just come back again with the BBS? as I'm assuming it came from here in the first place.

Also, anything I can do for the fry like adding salt etc? anything else? I have a shop open that I can go to so if anyone can tell me any meds I might need that would be great

Am really cross about this as my babies were doing so well and were so big for how old they are too so thought they were really healthy

Well I've completely stripped the tank and scrubbed it clean. The babies seem ok and are now back in their tank minus the gravel. The good thing about getting them out was finding exactly how many I have. There are 22 of them

They are now tucking into their dinner of microworms and newly hatched bbs and seem non the worse for their little adventure

Glad to hear it.

I can almost promise you that the hydra didn't come from your bbs. It was more than likely already living in the gravel/tank. It's good that you cleaned it out because they will destroy your entire spawn in no time.

Thanks Wuv

Yes, after reading up a little more I realise that it must have come in on plants and probably been in there all the time.

I took some photos of the babies in their newly cleaned tank. I can see dorsal fins already!

another pic of the fry next to a wooden airstone

last one

awwww Hello beautiful wittle Christmas babies

can you link me to the site on hydra?

Hydras shouldnt be makeing your fry sick, the oly thing they can do to them is eat them. And while it may seem that they couldnt possibly come in on BBS I had some sanfransisco Bay cysts that had hydra eggs in them, When Ever I added them to my tank I found I had a hydra bloom, I thought it was just the extra food untill I added them to a clean empty bowl, to grow them out a bit, and noticed hydras show up, So either they came on the cysts or in the kosher salt (I sure hope its the cysts)