how do feather dusters reproduce?

salty420

salty420

this fish was coming on to me
Mar 8, 2007
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Sugar Grove, IL
Just curious...
as some may know i had some bad luck with my clowns killing off 2 feather dusters in my tank. for some reason they decided they hated they dusters. they started biting them, and would hover near the tubes until the crowns would appear and then they would rip them apart. soon they just started ripping the tubes apart. so, eventually i covered the tubes with pop bottles. anywho after a while i got a nem and the clowns bonded with it so i figured the dusters would be safe. well they weren't and long story short the dusters are dead. not long after i found 2 new baby hawaiian feather dusters growing out of a piece of LR above where the mother duster had been in the sand. for whatever reason (because they are in the rock not in the sand..?) the clowns do not bother these duster or the new awesome purple duster i have in the tank. anyway the babies are getting to be pretty big now, one is almost full sized. i am so happy to have the babies (free dusters, yay) but i really don't know how they got there..? expecially since the mother was covered by a bottle. i did have the bottle off for a few days at the end and it did have plenty of holes/slits in it for water flow... so anyway... how do feather dusters reproduce?
 
Ahhh..The good ol' days when I had them before.:D

This might help.:)
http://www.advancedaquarist.com/issues/aug2002/invert.htm
Feather duster worms reproduce both sexually and asexually. Sexual reproduction involves the release of gametes into the water where the fertilized eggs develop into free-swimming larvae that eventually settle in an appropriate habitat. In the case of Serpulids, they settle on corals and the coral grows around the calcareous tube they build, making asexual reproduction nearly an impossibility for them. Soft tube varieties reproduce sexually, but many form dense colonies of clones by a budding process called scissipary. In this process the posterior end of the worm breaks off and develops a new crown while the "parent" grows a new posterior.
 
Once my little baby feather dusters grow up some more and I figure out a way to transplant them, you are welcome to have a couple Salty, I literally have hundreds of them!

Two years ago I bought some LR and on one of the rocks we discovered a colony of about 20 or so feather dusters, 4 or 5 small to medium sized dusters and the rest all tiny babies. Today, every rock in my tank has at least 3 on it, plus the original colony and for some reason, one rock on the side of my tank where I do not have that much current. Which makes me wonder about what Lupin posted (which was very informative by the way), perhaps some larvae settled down in this corner of my tank, because on that rock, I have at least 20 more, no kidding.

I have asked Santa for a new camera this year, if I have been deemed a good boy perhaps I can get it and take some pics of my baby dusters. I have tried before with my current camera and you can't see anything really.
 
No unfortunately, most of them are not. I have suspicions about 3 or 4 that I have on one piece of LR on the right side of my tank. They are still pretty small, but their coloration is similar to that of your typical Hawaiin.

The rest I don't believe are Hawaiin, they are just the tiny guys that you see in more mature tanks. As these others start to grow larger I will let you know. The fan on one of largest little guys is about 1/4" to 1/3" in diameter, so I am hoping that these turn out for the better.
 
i was at the LFS the other day they had a full size one growing out of a piece of LR lol it was awesome
 
some pics to show what im talking about

ok so i figured a pic was worth a thousand words...
this is the bigger one, too bad it's tube is curving behind the shrooms...
bigbabyduster.jpg


this is the smaller one
littlebabyduster.jpg


and here is a pic to show where the original "mother" was. basically in the bottom right where i've put the lovely red x.
toshowwheremotherwas.jpg

see what i mean about it being pretty far away? and crazy that they are popping out of the LR??
 
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