little crawly things

Yeh, I have seen them in my tank too!  Pretty ugly little critters are they not?  Even my yellow tang likes to get rid of as many as he/she can find!  Not necessarily eat, just bite a few times and swim off.

They are Copepods.  They are a good thing to have.  These are the diet of a lot of fish including Manderin Dragonettes.

I love having all this stuff in my tank, I just like to know what it is.  Don't know why for sure, but I do.  I will try and bring bits and pieces of things to the jan meeting--since I have more stuff I want to identify, and seeing it in person usually helps.  My fish eat a few, but there are only two, and the tank had almost 5 months with no predators in it...  does wonders for your bug population.

Thanks Nate for those excellent pics of Grammeras, part of the Amphipod group of organisms. They can be found as long as 3/8 inch. They are very useful in eating algae before we can see it and eating small pieces of detritus. The soft brown algae that covers my rock each day in the sunlight is consumed at night by these great little critters.

The much smaller, fraction of a milimeter, white, fast moving bugs on the glass are most likely copepods. Here are some pics that are color adjusted to make them look interesting:



This is not a copepod but does look interesting



Edited by Mark Peterson