PeterChefalo
12/01/2007, 02:53 PM
This is an experience that I want to share in order to give some balance to the acropora red bug hysteria that is on the internet. I am interested if other people have similar observations. I want to stress that this is not a claim of proof in any way because there really are no data points , just trends to speak of and trends can be pure coincidence. That said, a friend of mine brought over a mesoscope to look at my aquarium and we noticed these yellow red spotted amphipods crawling over my smooth tissued acroporas. I went on the net and of course found that they were acropora red bugs, read the horror stories and fell into a panic that my presious acroporas were going to be overrun with irritating parasites! At the time I could see about twenty happily frolicking bugs on the corals and from the stories was convinced that soon there would be hundreds of bugs and dozens of slowly receding coral skeletons in my 270 gallon display. I read the solutions to this problem and while I am very fond of my smooth-skinned acros I had no desire to poison a whole class of organisms in my system. I cannot practically remove each coral to a separate container, treat it and return it to the tank because they are all mounted very firmly and and anyway was convinced that that would do the corals more harm than good. I decided that i needed a natural predator but it can be tricky to obtain a dragon-faced pipefish in a timely fashion. So I added what I could from the local fish stores, a very small six line wrasse (Pseudocheilinus hexataenia) and five green clown gobies(gobiodon histrio) plus I became very attentive to reducing phosphates in the system for reasons of good husbandry unrelated to the red bugs. I reasoned that given the size of the gobies and their habit of moving among the branches of the coral, they may find the red bugs to be a tasty morsel just in passing. The wrasse of course is an active hunter of small crustaceans. So I started with about twenty visible bugs and after about a week was down to say 15 or so. Then I was down to maybe seven visible red bugs after about four weeks, then I was down to two visible bugs and held there for four weeks then was down to just one and now after about eight weeks I cannot find any red bugs in the tank on the visible parts of those corals. Now, I am sure that there are some red bugs in that tank somewhere, but I never experienced any explosion in the number of bugs and the corals are thriving, perhaps mostly because of my new attentiveness to phosphate levels. By the way, at about week six I introduced a dragon-faced pipefish, it never left the substrate of the tank where none of my corals reside and is now missing and presumed dead. Have other people been able to passively control acro red bugs? I want to repeat that I never saw any goby or wrasse eat a redbug but am reporting the coincidence of the introduction of possible predators and attentiveness to water quality with the decline of a red bug population in a closed system.