Urgent is this hitchhiker bad?!

I have had him for so many years now, he gets the same treatment as the fish and corals. He is huge, next time I take out the rock I will post an image of him.

 

I love my bristle there creepy but very helpful IMO. And I wanna see that bristle Cheryl!

 

This image is over a year old.



It's nice that we can share images of our bristle worms. lol

 

Woah! Here's mine.

 

I'm with Corailline, I'd like to see pics of a bristleworm eating a healthy, living clownfish, especially since the worms don't have jaws and cannot bite but just suck down soft, squishy stuff.

Bristleworms were for years considered "bad guys" due to misinformation and lack of education about them. People used to get onto me for not getting rid of mine years ago, but after years of observation back then, I didn't buy into the "they'll kill/eat everything in your tank" because I never saw it happen. I did see my nassarius snails, peppermint shrimp, and cleaner shrimp kill a few healthy and not-dead-yet things, but no one gives them a bad rep LOL.

Both of these came out of my old 38 gallon tank the 2 times I broke it down, and obviously I never knew they were there & never lost a thing to them.

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I have about 5 (3 very large) ones living in the burrow with my 1 1/2" pistol shrimp. If they were going to kill something, it would be him every time he molts. Hasn't happened yet. They do steal his food, so I have to spend 10 minutes poking them out of his way so I can personally hand him his food with a large pair of tweezers. Pain in the butt, but they're too big for a trap and too smart to come out far enough to catch, plus they're under a large keystone rock that sits on the glass under the sand. If I could catch them, I'd remove them simply because they're making it difficult to feed my $40 shrimp, but not because they're horrible killers that will destroy my tank.

 

thanks for the feeddback guys! it was just bothersome ahah cheryl im gunna post some new pics for my sps ! check em out today!

 

I will most definitely keep a look out.