# What are these?



## Aaron27 (Sep 15, 2010)

I bought some live rock for a 2nd tank I was setting up and it came with some mushrooms that had these weird little critters/things on them.
They started out as freckles on all the mushrooms, but after I added some frags of my own to the new tank, the little things have migrated onto the corals as well as the glass.
I have no idea what they are, and I can't seem to ID them on my own. They don't appear to be harming the corals or mushrooms, but when feed the fish sometimes small flakes will land on the mushrooms, and these little guys will flock to the food and devour it. The 2nd picture shows them eating a piece of food near the top of the mushroom.

3rd picture shows how they've migrated over to my torch.
4th picture just shows them on the glass (uggh my glass looks filthy in that picture).

Any help would be muchly appreciated. If they're pests I'd like to quickly begin eradicating them before they do any harm.


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## joker1535 (May 23, 2010)

They almost look like flatworms. Not reef safe. Do some research on them and compare them with what you got.


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## SeaHorse_Fanatic (Apr 22, 2010)

Flatworms. You need to quickly swish them in some fw to get rid of them.


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## Aaron27 (Sep 15, 2010)

So just make up a bucket of fresh water which matches my tank temperature, then swish my corals around in it?


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## SeaHorse_Fanatic (Apr 22, 2010)

Yeah. The flatworms will float off right away. The problem is that you should have done this before you added the corals & live rock into your tank. Now your tank is infested and swishing the corals will help eliminate some, but not all the flatworms. 

A few seconds in fw should not hurt the rocks or corals. sw flatworms though don't like fw at all.


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## Fishdude (Feb 20, 2012)

Chromis eat them! Just wanted to let you know.


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## spit.fire (Jan 3, 2011)

Manually remove as many as you can with the above mentioned methods, afterwards you can use flatworm exit but it has it's risks, after flatworm exit do a large water change and another one a few days later

As I said it has it's risks as if there is enough flatworms left in the tank they can nuke a tank when you kill them off


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## spit.fire (Jan 3, 2011)

I also have heard that there are a few wrasses that will eat them


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## scott tang (Jan 29, 2012)

blue nutabranches eat them and only them they have some at rogers or ask j&l about em


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