# More hydra in my rcs tank...



## Fishlover02 (Feb 25, 2013)

Here's a little background info before I state what's happened: Last summer, I went down to one of the local marshes and collected some plants... bad idea. They came loaded with tons of unwanted organisms, the worst being plant eating snails and hydra. I had an infestation of these and other little insects throughout all of my tanks. Anyhow, I ended up dosing the tanks with quite a bit of CuSo4 (Copper sulphate), and I thought I had gotten rid of all the unwanted pond creatures. I've been "clean" of them for months since. So one of the tanks, a ten gallon tank ended up getting set up as a dirted red cherry shrimp tank. It's been running very smoothly for the last couple months with no real issues, up until today. When I went to go turn on their light this morning, what do I see? Snails and Hydra, and large hydra at that. Now, there's a good chance that the snails could have come from the lone ramshorn snail that I've got in there, if they are asexual. The hydra on the other hand, I don't know. I don't have another cycled tank to move them to, and so far I only see them in that tank. Now my question is: What do I do to get rid of the hydra, while protecting the shrimp? As I've got well over 140 in there that I'd rather not lose...


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## Fishlover02 (Feb 25, 2013)

Thanks ahead for any/all responses, it's much appreciated


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## laurahmm (Apr 1, 2010)

Since you have shrimp, you might not want to medicate. I never medicate my shrimp tanks. I had the same problem as well. Asolene Spixi snails will eat hydra. There are several members here that are selling them for a very reasonable price. The snails work slowly though. They dont actively seek out the hydra but will eat them if they run across them. If you dont feed them anything else then they will eat the hydra faster. However this will take several months or so to totally eradicate the hydra. Goodluck!


Laura


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## supershrimp (Dec 29, 2011)

I have used no planaria ,it's natural and it worked for me. 

Good luck


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## randy (Jan 29, 2012)

It's almost impossible to get away with hydra for my shrimp tanks. I use spixi snails but as Laura said they work slowly. I use fenbendazole if I want to get rid of them quick. Some people have reservation on this or similar meds but it hasn't been any issue for me so far.


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## Fishlover02 (Feb 25, 2013)

laurahmm said:


> Since you have shrimp, you might not want to medicate. I never medicate my shrimp tanks. I had the same problem as well. Asolene Spixi snails will eat hydra. There are several members here that are selling them for a very reasonable price. The snails work slowly though. They dont actively seek out the hydra but will eat them if they run across them. If you dont feed them anything else then they will eat the hydra faster. However this will take several months or so to totally eradicate the hydra. Goodluck!
> 
> Laura


Slowly is better then none at all... but yeah, I really don't want to risk the shrimp, that'd be too many to lose (120+ added plus 5+ different egg sets) I may have to give those a try..


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## coldmantis (Apr 5, 2010)

I have hydra in 3 of my shrimp tanks, I put in 3-4 almost quarter size spixis and in a weeks time I can't find any hydras.


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## Jackson (Jan 30, 2009)

If you want to buy some spixi snails lmk. Its about that time of year where ill be over flowing with youngsters. 
Just note that if you do not feed the snails well your plants if you have any will become a meal.


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## Fishlover02 (Feb 25, 2013)

coldmantis said:


> I have hydra in 3 of my shrimp tanks, I put in 3-4 almost quarter size spixis and in a weeks time I can't find any hydras.


sounds like good results


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## Fishlover02 (Feb 25, 2013)

Jackson said:


> If you want to buy some spixi snails lmk. Its about that time of year where ill be over flowing with youngsters.
> Just note that if you do not feed the snails well your plants if you have any will become a meal.


I may want to... and well, I do feed my shrimp well, but if it were to become an issue I'm alright with them eating the plants, I have more in other tanks that I can move in, there's only one species that I'd actually care about if they were demolished


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## LTPGuy (Aug 8, 2012)

I had to face a similar dilemma with a planaria outbreak in my Sulawesi setup. Planaria is not as bad as hydra where shrimps are concern, but they have to be dealt with in similar way. Here are your options...

1. Introduce fauna that will feed on your problem but not your shrimps. My opinion respectfully is that it's a good approach when prevention is your objective. I am not a big fan of this approach as you're introducing more variables (not necessarily all good) which you have to deal with. Maybe it's not as effective, or takes too long, and may introduce other problems.

2. Medicate base on repeatable and successful experience. Randy has mention "fendbendazole" and someone else mention "No Planaria". Although I don't know Randy personally and have never met him, I hold his comments and knowledge with the highest of regards. I would consider him a master hobbyist where shrimps are concerned. If he has used it with success, I would not think twice otherwise. Here is a *link *that really encouraged me on going the medicated route; at least with fendbendazole vs planaria & hydra. Again, repeatable & successful experience.

3. Your 3rd option is to transfer to a new tank, cycled preferred or not*. This was the route I went for, because it was very difficult to find fendbendazole in Canada. You can get it from ebay but shipping may be an issue. I went with an _uncycled _tank because, like you, I didn't have an extra cycled tank. My justification is as follow...

i) Shrimps has low bioload, and I had only 15 shrimps including one babies.
ii) I have high light with reasonable amount of floating plants to uptake the ammonia.

It has been 20 days since, and I had 3 mortality which I attribute to acclimation as they were newly introduced shrimps. The baby should have died first if the uncycled tank was the issue. The baby is still active.

Furthermore, cherry shrimps are much much hardier than other species.

So instead of telling you don't do this or that, you're choice are laid out and pick a path you feel most comfortable with.

Good luck with you battle. It's too bad that you live so far as I would love to have some hydra to culture!


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## coldmantis (Apr 5, 2010)

Fishlover02 said:


> I may want to... and well, I do feed my shrimp well, but if it were to become an issue I'm alright with them eating the plants, I have more in other tanks that I can move in, there's only one species that I'd actually care about if they were demolished


I feed my shrimps twice a week and I have seen the spixi eat only dead plants or dead shrimps only. never healthy shrimp or plants.


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## supershrimp (Dec 29, 2011)

2. Medicate base on repeatable and successful experience. Randy has mention "fendbendazole" and someone else mention "No Planaria". 

I'm "someone else" 

I used no planaria and it killed all hydra the same day or so. I also didn't loose 1 shrimp. Did it on my cherry and CBS /TB tank. They came in through plants that I didn't clean well enough.


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## Fishlover02 (Feb 25, 2013)

Well, I think I`m going to try the snails first, as I don't like messing with chemicals all that much, unless I have to. Worse comes to worse, they take awhile OR they don't get them all. Either way, I tried them first. As well, I don't have anywhere near as many visible hydra as I did with the first wave of infestation, so the snails would get the job done (I think at least)


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## Fishlover02 (Feb 25, 2013)

coldmantis said:


> I feed my shrimps twice a week and I have seen the spixi eat only dead plants or dead shrimps only. never healthy shrimp or plants.


Well, that's encouraging


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## Fishlover02 (Feb 25, 2013)

LTPGuy said:


> Good luck with you battle. It's too bad that you live so far as I would love to have some hydra to culture!


Just out of curiosity what would you be interested in with culturing hydra? Just to say you did it purposefully, or?


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## Fishfur (Mar 4, 2012)

Yeah, I'd be curious to know why anyone would want to culture hydra too.

Just a suggestion, as you mentioned wondering where the hydra came from this time. As you found with wild gathered plants, they can bring quite an assortment of critters with them, some harmless, others anything but ! If you have added plants from a store to your tank, that is very likely the source. It can help to isolate new plants for some period of time before putting them in a tank. I've got pics of predatory insect larvae that came with plants, along with scuds, hydra, snails, algae and a small host of other things. Most are harmless enough, but the insect larvae can eat fry or young shrimp with ease. Scuds have been said to prey on baby shrimp, as do hydra, but they are not active predators. It's more a case of bad luck, if a baby shrimp happens to be in the wrong place when a hydra puts out it's tentacles. They don't swim around looking for food to kill, they have to be anchored to something solid, I believe, before they can sting and eat what they catch.. much like salt water anemones do.

A bucket with a clamp lamp and an air stone works fine for a few days as a plant QT and if you suspect any critters or see anything you'd rather not have in your tank snails or anything else, you can treat the plants in the bucket. Bleach works on some things, so does H202, Potassium Permanganate or even Excel for some things. 

Be aware some plants are very sensitive to most things used for treatment of snails or algae, etc. Vals for one, have a sad habit of melting, though they may regenerate from the roots if there are good roots on them.


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## Fishlover02 (Feb 25, 2013)

Fishfur said:


> Yeah, I'd be curious to know why anyone would want to culture hydra too.
> 
> Just a suggestion, as you mentioned wondering where the hydra came from this time. As you found with wild gathered plants, they can bring quite an assortment of critters with them, some harmless, others anything but ! If you have added plants from a store to your tank, that is very likely the source. It can help to isolate new plants for some period of time before putting them in a tank. I've got pics of predatory insect larvae that came with plants, along with scuds, hydra, snails, algae and a small host of other things. Most are harmless enough, but the insect larvae can eat fry or young shrimp with ease. Scuds have been said to prey on baby shrimp, as do hydra, but they are not active predators. It's more a case of bad luck, if a baby shrimp happens to be in the wrong place when a hydra puts out it's tentacles. They don't swim around looking for food to kill, they have to be anchored to something solid, I believe, before they can sting and eat what they catch.. much like salt water anemones do.
> 
> ...


I have quarantined any plants that I knew came from sources with snails/ other unwanted creatures... I did get some plants at the DRAS convention in Ajax a couple of weeks ago, and some plants from another guy just last weekend, however neither set went into that tank, and the other tanks which have them in them do not (as far as I see) have anything going on that's unwanted... And with the order last weekend, I know they were pest free as they were grown emmersed. I've heard that hydra can survive out of water for quite some time... does anyone know how long? As it's possible that they could have come from the tank's original rocks which I re-added after drying for a few months (to try to rid them of hydra among other things).


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## LTPGuy (Aug 8, 2012)

Fishlover02 said:


> Just out of curiosity what would you be interested in with culturing hydra? Just to say you did it purposefully, or?


I've never seen a hydra in person, and have never even heard of or care for them prior to getting into shrimps recently.

Having seen their photo, I find them quite beautiful and their deadly aspect (at least to baby fauna) accentuate that beauty. Philosophically, it's like the two edge sword aspect in everything - the capacity for good and evil.

Algae in an aquarium under control environment can be a thing of beauty. I've seen photo where someone did an awesome aquascape using algae! Sorry I don't have the link as it was a long time ago.

Likewise, hydra can be a thing of beauty under certain circumstances.

Secondly, I want to learn first hand as much as I can about these guys.

To me, they are like fresh water anemone!


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## Fishlover02 (Feb 25, 2013)

LTPGuy said:


> I've never seen a hydra in person, and have never even heard of or care for them prior to getting into shrimps recently.
> 
> Having seen their photo, I find them quite beautiful and their deadly aspect (at least to baby fauna) accentuate that beauty. Philosophically, it's like the two edge sword aspect in everything - the capacity for good and evil.
> 
> ...


Well, they do look quite cool, and that analogy fits them perfectly. If they didn't cause issues, I personally would not mind keeping them in there, however they do, so therefore they must be sped!


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## razoredge (Dec 31, 2011)

LTPGuy said:


> I've never seen a hydra in person, and have never even heard of or care for them prior to getting into shrimps recently.
> 
> Having seen their photo, I find them quite beautiful and their deadly aspect (at least to baby fauna) accentuate that beauty. Philosophically, it's like the two edge sword aspect in everything - the capacity for good and evil.
> 
> ...


I was just cleaning up my kid's Flora tank and noticed a couple of large hydra's. If your truly interested in them. I can take the plant clippings and keep it for you otherwise I will just throw them out. I will probably dose it with meds later to keep it free from hydras.


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## randy (Jan 29, 2012)

I have had tanks cycling with nothing but substrate and I got hydras in there. It's not common in fish tank probably because fish would eat them. The most interesting fact about this thing is -- they are immortal. They have the ability to live forever when environment is good for them. It would be an achievement to keep one for like 50 years ;-)

I noticed like 5 of them in a tank a week ago, within a week they took over the sponge filter. I had 2 adult spixi in there but removed them before hydra multiplied. Last night I was looking at the tank with my 10 years old son and we saw a day-old baby blue diamond climbed up the sponge filter with hundred of hydras, we watched for about 5 minutes but the babies didn't get too dangerouly close to any hydra. Although I have maybe 20-30 newly hatched spixi snails in the tank they are probably too small to do the job, so I added fenbendazole. I don't even measure the dosage too carefully now with febendazole, this morning I can see the bigger ones shrunk.

Problem with fenbendazole is, it's not permanent from my experience. I believe it's because it doesn't kill the "eggs" effectively so you might have an outbreak down the road. In some of my tanks, they would come back every 4 to 5 months.

Another thing is that it's suggested to do a water change 3 days of the dosing. However I never did do that. I think if you are using fenbendazole to kill massive planaria invasion (normally it's dose, WC in 3 days and dose again, then water change 3 days later), water change is more important because planarias are bigger and so many of them die at the same time can give you an ammonia spike. For hydras, since they are so small, the chance of a spike is not as likely. Plus, I have seen shrimps eating them so I just leave them alone after dosage.

Are they really bad for shrimplets? I believe so. I have tried to leave them alone in a CRS tank and I could see the hydras near the area where babies hang out turn pinkish while other area they are just translucent. Guess what made them pinkish?


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## LTPGuy (Aug 8, 2012)

razoredge said:


> I was just cleaning up my kid's Flora tank and noticed a couple of large hydra's. If your truly interested in them. I can take the plant clippings and keep it for you otherwise I will just throw them out. I will probably dose it with meds later to keep it free from hydras.


PMed! Hopefully you can hold it until next weekend.


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## Fishfur (Mar 4, 2012)

One other source I neglected to mention for hydra is water. Because they can free swim, it's possible they arrive via the water other livestock come in. They don't appear to be able to prey on anything unless they're anchored, but they can certainly get around and they look just like a nematode in free swim mode. They close up the tentacles when swimming, to the point you really cannot tell it's not a worm until it anchors itself and opens them up. Chances are they wouldn't be seen or noticed in a bag of shrimp or fish.

I also wonder how long any eggs they may lay remain viable, and if they survive drying out. Some creatures eggs are very resilient, surviving all manner of conditions due to thick walls or other mechanisms. I'll have to see if I can find out, as I'd never thought to do much research into their life cycles before.

But I'm sure there's no question they are dangerous to baby shrimp who wander close enough to be stung by them, so you don't want them in a shrimp tank.

* Just did a quick search of their life cycle and it turns out they can produce a 'resting egg' stage that is quite resistant to poor environmental conditions and will sit and wait until conditions are good before hatching. They can reproduce both asexually, known as budding, and sexually. Some are hermaphrodites, but not all of them. There are quite a few species in most of the fresh waters of the world but only where water is clean. They have very little tolerance for pollution, no doubt why they do well in aquariums, where we try so hard to maintain clean water.

Their immortality is well accepted in the scientific community, and is the subject of much research but it will be a very long time before any of it is applicable to humans. Their apparent lack of aging appears to be due to them having regenerative cells which continually renew themselves. As with planaria, if they're severed into pieces, the pieces can regenerate into a new animal, so killing them is really not possible by mechanical means. Poisoning or physical removal are the only real choices. 

Fish do eat them, but hydra can prey on small fish fry that get too close as well, so if you're raising fish, you don't want hydra either, any more than if you have shrimp. The only saving grace is that they can't actually attack anything unless it comes close enough to them while they are anchored. I also learned they can move from place to place by a sort of humping motion, known as looping. They move their basal foot, by which they adhere to solid surfaces, from one place to another, with the tentacles as a temporary support as they move the foot over. And they can float or thrash in water if they become detached.. what I earlier called free swimming, is not truly swimming, but they are quite able to hang around in the water until they find a new attachment point to adhere to.

Remarkable creatures, really. Though it may look like they're always dangerous, they are not always on the hunt, as it takes them a few days to digest a meal. If a prey item comes close, the stinging cells, which are like those of jelly fish, called nematocysts, have a coiled mechanism that shoots out and injects the prey. The tentacles, which have many nematocysts on them, wrap around the prey as it is repeatedly stung and it's soon dead. It's pulled to the centre of the tentacles, where the hydra's mouth is located, and consumed. The indigestable remains are ejected from the same place few days later.. it's the only opening to the digestive tract they have . The only reason I can see that they don't seem to consume the baby shrimp they sting, is likely because the shrimp are bit too large to pull into the mouth. Hydra can expand to eat things twice their own size, but they are very small, and the shrimp might also be a bit unwieldy for them to grab. In the wild, their normal prey are small daphnia and similar creatures, and no doubt they kill more than a few things they don't manage to eat.


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## shrimpzoo (Jan 15, 2012)

I dose Panacur C (febendazole) - http://www.1800petmeds.com/Panacur+C-prod10674.html to deal with Hydra + Planaria.

All I do is drop a few chunky pieces into a test tube filled with tank water and crush it with an eye dropper until it is fully dissolved then directly spray it onto any hydra I see clinging onto the glass or plants and imagine them screaming in the tank lol.

I've used it on my Snowballs and Crystal Reds/Blacks. They breed normally as if nothing happened.

I personally don't see anything to fear from it ._. ... white powder into a tank *problem solved*.

I believe it was 0.1gram for 10 gallons. You don't have to be exact with that but just don't go overboard.

I usually make a 5mL liquid mixture and dose 3.5mL on the first dose then the rest the next day.

My shrimp have eaten the pieces of febendazole that were dissolved lol. For me that is a good enough gurantee that's safe.

If you ever use it for planaria, be sure to spray some of it into the substrate because that is where they run into lol.


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