Too Many Pods?

[karigupi]

I seem to have had a pod explosion there must be 100s of thousands of pods in there at the moment.

The tank is 260ltrs, about a month old, 27k liverock stock is still very light, we have a watchman goby & a bristletail file fish & a little black rock goby, a toadstool, star polyp & zoa frags. We are battling hair algea at the moment, i'm going to weed the sand bed before water change roday.

Stats are: temp 26, salinity 1.025, ammonia 0, nitrite 0, nitrate 5

At the moment I guess we dont have any fish who would munch on the pods, so they seem to have gone totally out of control, they cover the glass, which I remember being fine from before at this point, but there are 100s of thousands in the water column too.

I'm culturing pods in a seperate tank for a mandarin we hope to purchase in the future, so later on I am going to remove a load in the water change & move them to the other tank, but I just wondered if you can have too many pods in a tank? Is it a sign of something unhealthy? Will it settle once we have more stock?

 

[Morri]

Pods are very hardy but are very reliant on food,

Are you feeding the tank with phyto?

Is the tank in direct sunlight?

Are you running any form of phosphate remover (more for Algae Problem)?

Can you send me a few 100,000 pods

 

[Seren]

Lucky you! It is not uncommon to have a population explosion of pods if the conditions are right and they do help keep the tank stable.
They are probably feeding on the algae and the resulting zooplankton, butI should think your Gobies and certainly your Mushies will enjoy snacking on them!
Mine normally congregate on the glass where there is a light source coming in, My Bi colour Blennie leaves kiss marks on the glass where he grazes!
As Morri says look at your Phosphate levels to explain the Algae bloom, or check yuour N test kit, the last time I had an algael bloom, I did not realise I'd had a N spike until I changed the test kit!
I'll have the ones Morri doesn't want please!
Seren

 

[karigupi]

lol, thanks guys, i'll let you know if I start bottling them up for now i've taken a few jugs worth out & will set up a second culture in the window.

I was thinking about the direct sunlight, as there is one corner of the tank which gets about an hour or two full sunlight in the morning & this is where the biggest concentration of pods is.

I need to buy a phosphate test kit, as my algea problem is getting out of hand & I think the pod explosion may be partly down to this too.

Am using seachem phosguard, I just brought a new salifert nitrate kit last week, so that reading should be ok.

Am going to try cutting the lights right down to just a few hours a day for a couple of days, let the CUC catch up

Thanks for your help, it looks so weird in the tank, like its snowing lol

 

[xxBarneyxx]

Never a bad thing to have lots of pods. If they have an abundant food source and no real predators they do reproduce quickly. In our nano we only have 1 small goby and its is swarming with pods and bristle worms.

With the phosphate remover. How long have you had it in there? Most phosphate remover can only absorb so much phosphate before it stops working so has to be replaced regularly. How often you replace it depends on your phosphate levels.