copepod

One of my hermit crabs died in a rather out of the way place where I was not
able to remove him from the tank. I watched my levels every day while he
was decomposing and they stayed in line, no ammonia, no nitrites, nitrates
were less then 10, ph at 8.0, SG 1.00022 (yeah, I am already mixing SW for a
water change tomorrow, I do 20% every two weeks). These levels never moved.
I guess my biological filter is pretty good, in a 37g I have a DSB of 4"-6"
,depending where you look, and about 60lbs of LR, since I only have 3
clowns, a cleaner shrimp, two sand sifting stars and a collection of hermit
crabs, I guess the bioload is easy for the LR to deal with)

Anyway, I did not remove the dead crab from the tank and now, where the
crab is decaying, there are lots of little "bugs". From what I can find
they seem to be copepods. Problem is, I can find some information that
helps to identify the bugs, I can't find anything that tells me if they are
bad or not. Should I do something to get rid of them ? At the same time
that the bugs showed up, I also starting having an increase of algae on the
back and sides of my tank that had very short hairs growing out of it, I
looked this up and the usual cause of GHA is an increase in phosphates. My
phosphates have been .25 or less for the last three weeks, even before the
shrimp died, the algae started to grow, or the bugs showed up.

Any experience with this ?

Those are good little things to have.. most of the time unless it is
something big, removing a small dead fish or crab or shrimp isn't even
necessary.. and many times when it happens you don't even realize it until
you notice something is missing... they get eaten by other things in the
tank and are gone before you see it. Are you sure it was actually a dead
crab and not just the molting? I thought for sure one of mine had died after
I first got them but then realized I could still count the same number I had
put in there... they molt and it sure looks like a crab corpse!

Teeb

"plaguebeast" wrote in message
...
One of my hermit crabs died in a rather out of the way place where I was
not
able to remove him from the tank. I watched my levels every day while he
was decomposing and they stayed in line, no ammonia, no nitrites, nitrates
were less then 10, ph at 8.0, SG 1.00022 (yeah, I am already mixing SW for
a
water change tomorrow, I do 20% every two weeks). These levels never
moved.
I guess my biological filter is pretty good, in a 37g I have a DSB of
4"-6"
,depending where you look, and about 60lbs of LR, since I only have 3
clowns, a cleaner shrimp, two sand sifting stars and a collection of
hermit
crabs, I guess the bioload is easy for the LR to deal with)

Anyway, I did not remove the dead crab from the tank and now, where the
crab is decaying, there are lots of little "bugs". From what I can find
they seem to be copepods. Problem is, I can find some information that
helps to identify the bugs, I can't find anything that tells me if they
are
bad or not. Should I do something to get rid of them ? At the same time
that the bugs showed up, I also starting having an increase of algae on
the
back and sides of my tank that had very short hairs growing out of it, I
looked this up and the usual cause of GHA is an increase in phosphates.
My
phosphates have been .25 or less for the last three weeks, even before the
shrimp died, the algae started to grow, or the bugs showed up.

Any experience with this ?