# Spawning Feather Duster's



## Osiris (Jan 18, 2005)

TheOldSalt said:


> Ah, Xenia...the gift that keeps on giving.
> 
> Featherdusters are pretty easy to keep if you feed them some liquid/suspension filter feeder food. They have a habit of shedding their crown of feathers, though, which makes people often think they've died, resulting in the worms being thrown out before they could grow their crowns back again.
> Dusters are also easy to spawn artificially. Take a bunch of dusters and put them together in a shallow bowl of seawater. Poke at them from their rear ends. Dusters exude mass quanties of gametes as a defensive measure, so after a while you should have a bowlfull of eggs & sperm all mixed together nicely. Put the worms back in their tank, stir the cloudy water in the bowl, and pour the goo into a small tank with no mechanical filtration & no fish. In a few weeks you'll see hundreds of little tiny baby featherdusters all over the place.


 
So their new tank u put the bowl of eggs/sperm together would just have heater and airstone?

How long does it take for them to begin developing?


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## Fishfirst (Jan 24, 2005)

listening in on this one  I am fairly excited about this.


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## TheOldSalt (Jan 28, 2005)

In a bare tank with just an airstone you'll see the baby dusters in the corners, hanging onto the sealer, and a few on the floor.
Your best bet though is to use some base grade live rock so more of them will have a good attachment point. The rocks will be transformed into "worm rocks' in a month. Good live rock will work too as long as it has no tunicates or bivalves or other filter feeders on it which would eat the duster larvae.
It takes about two weeks to see that you have ..something...but about 3 to see that they are featherdusters.
By the way, you won't be able top raise them in a nice sparkling clean tank. They'll need a "wild meadow" style dirty, lived-in tank with lots of stuff floating in the water.


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## Osiris (Jan 18, 2005)

Very interesting, would i use like a pin or something to poke in the rear ends? do i poke the casing or actually stick it through the bottem of the tube inside?


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## TheOldSalt (Jan 28, 2005)

Just poke the back of the casing with your finger, not a pin.


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## Fishfirst (Jan 24, 2005)

A few other questions... 
does it matter which species you get?
does it matter if they are attached to lr?
can I use the water I do for a water change to feed these guys and maybe add some phyto?


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## Osiris (Jan 18, 2005)

Good questions fish, i was thinking more of kinda overdosing on DT's to have a constant flow of them in the tank, or is that a bad idea?


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## Fishfirst (Jan 24, 2005)

oh and also what size do they need to be to breed?


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## TheOldSalt (Jan 28, 2005)

I haven't tried this with serpulid worms, only sabellid worms, so I don't know how important species is. The typical brown & tan banded ones you see most commonly work well enough.
If they're attached to liverock, then poking them from behind would probably prove a bit tricky, eh? If you can do it, though, then it shouldn't matter.
Using waterchange water might be okay, but just keeping the system free of mechanical filtration & skimming until the larval worms have settled and then feeding with DT's or refugium algae scrapings should work fine. I used to do this fairly regularly in natural freshly collected seawater full of plankton, but the DT's should make a good enough substitute.
Come to think of it, dumping the eggs into the refugium and restricting the flow for several days while the larvae settle would probably work best of all.
They should of course be adult size in order to ensure full gamete production.


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## Fishfirst (Jan 24, 2005)

got it... thanks a lot... the experiment begins


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