bad anemone?

[eyedoc]

This 1" critter appeared on my 3 week cycling LR.
I was told to get rid of it because it is an aptesia anemone (?spelling).
Please advise.
Thanks

[DaveJohnson]

Yep, it's aptasia. Get rid of it ASAP.

Cheers,
Dave Johnson

[Fizz71]

I'll second that emotion. Just make sure you remove it properly or buy somebody that will eat him. Don't just rip him out. It looks like it's on a nice small rock?!

--Fizz

[toddpolish]

number of ways to get rid of them. how many do you have??

turkey baster with thick kalk paste or boiling (rodi) water
or buy some peppermint shrimp.

[toddpolish]

here...

[Jacksonbriggs]

i bought 2 peppermint shrimp and they didn't really do alot for my aptasia. thinking you need to get them before the aptasia get too large, they ate a few small ones but once they get a certain size got to take care of it yourself. good luck

[LowCel]

I've been using joes juice on mine. This stuff is awesome. www.joesjuice.com

[eyedoc]

Here is a follow up. The thing was on a small piece of rock, so I took it out and put it in the sun. Immediately upon removing it from the water it deflated to 5% of initial size. 1 hour in sun it became a thin film on the rock. Interesting that these are probably 99% water.

[reiple]

those anemones really suck. i removed all manually. PITA

[CrocoDillon]

I have alot on my new LR! I leave them because I've nothing in the tank that could be hurt by them. They're small ones. I'm trying to find a nudibranch that eats Aiptasia, they are hard to find. Species is Berghia Verrucicornis, i attached a pic of a nice looking one. Does anyone happen to know where I can find them in the Netherlands :rolleyes:

[eyedoc]

I would think these would be a limited food scorce for animals that eat them. The food source would run out, unless you are infested.

[jimsta]

That is an awesome lookin nudi!!

[EMS1]

So nobody has yet to explain what is bad about this type of anenome. Fill me in because I have three in my LR right now. I guess I thought they were good, can we say rookie!

[Reefmedic79]

How effective is boiling rodi water on killing them?

[Coral Dilema]

The problem with them is they reproduce faster than rabbits on viagra. They will overwhelm your tank quickly, kill them NOW. Mix a little kalkwasser VERY thick, use a hypo syrenge and squeeze a little out on top of the aptasia, dont try to inject it inside of it, just squeeze out a small ball of it and let it fall on top of the aptasia. That should do the trick. Mix the kalkwasser as thick as you can and still have it come out of the syrenge.

As far as boiling RO, I dont think boiling it is necessary, the problem with ro/di water method is you have to inject it inside of the aptasia, where as you just have to put the kalkwasser mix on top of the aptasia.

[Bungle]

Originally posted by EMS1
So nobody has yet to explain what is bad about this type of anenome. Fill me in because I have three in my LR right now. I guess I thought they were good, can we say rookie!
They are bad because they get out of hand taking your tank over.

[eyedoc]

I heard they sting your good corals.

[CrocoDillon]

Originally posted by eyedoc
I would think these would be a limited food scorce for animals that eat them. The food source would run out, unless you are infested.

That's nature, at least you wont have aiptasia...

I was thinking of some solutions for this... 1) give em to someone who has alot of Aiptasia, 2) Have a couple of bottles with Aiptasia to let them multiply, this way you have always the right food for them.

jimsta: my thought exactly :D

[David P]

aiptasia reproduce quite rapidly, take over the tank as said, and yes they can sting your fish/corals. You can kill them by injecting with kalk, hot water (I personally used to mix boiling water with kalk), injecting them with vinager, and what I do now is just mix some thick kalk paste and smear it on the aiptasia with my finger, this is the fastest method.

Now just to confuse you, not all aiptasia are bad. (dont flame me yet...) they are very good nutrient exports. I have a few peps in both of my tanks and have no aiptasias in the display, but the overflow is another story. One of my tanks the overflow is filled with aiptasia and as far as Im concerned, thats fine. A lot of the particulate matter that goes into the overflow will be eaten by the aiptasias, and so if they dont grow in my display, they're helping me.

One other thing Ive noticed, in my other tank, I have thousands of these tiny cleaner shrimp that only come out at night. The overflow on this tank used to have major amounts of aiptasia, but since the snail bloom, I only have 2 large aiptasias in the sump and Ive never seen a cleaner overflow.

[Reefmedic79]

Do aptasia require light also to survive? The reasin why I ask is, if its possible toremove the LR with the culpritand place it in the sump were there is no light.

[CrocoDillon]

They are fotosynthetic, so they need light. However if you keep 'em in the dark, they will produce a lot of tiny aiptasia trying to survive.

This is how you can get a good food source for small Berghia Verrucicornis nudibranches.

[karmenkame]

Originally posted by LowCel
I've been using joes juice on mine. This stuff is awesome. www.joesjuice.com

Does this stuff work better than boiling water? Why? Does the Boiling water trick not keep them from coming back? I have found one of these and it is pretty big. I was going to try the FREE boiling water trick but then I keep hearing about the joe's juice. What is the benefit of the juice over the water?

[eyedoc]

I read about injecting them with lemmon juice.
I just tried it yesterday. When the needle went in it contracted down as a reflex so I'm not sure the lemmon juice entered it's body.
We will soon see.

[mandktod]

I had a few that rode in on my LR, and in a couple weeks I had a few more but my tank was in mid cycle so I could not put anything in to eat them, I tried the injecting method but they are faster than me so that did not work, so I just decided to wait it out and see what happened, I finally got a couple pepermint shrimp after my tank cycled, but in the mean time it was kind of cool to watch them catch misis shrimp and eat them since they are transparent you can watch the whole process very cool, I watched one of them catch 2 whole misis at one time, anyway the pepermints finally discovered them and I have not had any since.

[eyedoc]

What did you mean by "I tried the injecting method but they are faster than me ".
They can't move, although they can shrink to avoid injury.

[shilo_1]

I have a mated pair of CBS in my tank, but found my first large PITA (hehehe) and see LOTS of small ones starting on my LR....I'm worried that introducing peppermint shrimp will upset my CBS.....any suggestions ?

[speccialj922]

i think your CBS might upset a peppermint by eating it. never owned a CBS (or 2 for that matter) but have read this so many times its rediculous. but i just saw that your tank is a 125, so if you have alot of rockwork, chances are they wont even see eachother.

[NH3]

Originally posted by eyedoc
I read about injecting them with lemmon juice.
I just tried it yesterday. When the needle went in it contracted down as a reflex so I'm not sure the lemmon juice entered it's body.
We will soon see.

Mine does the exact same thing. It can pop completely back into the hole it grows out of in an instant, almost like a feather duster without a tube. I'm sure its aptaisia but I wasn't aware they could 'move' like this.

[Scuba_Dave]

I have a very large CBS in w/a lg cleaner, 1 lg pepp, 3 sm pepp. So far so good.
Bear in mind that a lot of corals will grow back from next to nothing (Toadstool, Xenia, GSP). If you don't get all of it, it will just regrow
I've scraped GSP & Xenia down to bare rock, and they both came back. I also moved my toadstool, and the small speck (a dot!) that was attached to another rock has regrown to 3 small polyps. And the "slime" on another rock is growing a mass of polyps (dozens, maybe 100's), too small to count

[JRic999]

After reading posts about aiptasia, I realize that I have a few of them in my tank. Two of them are currently living on my Cup coral. Before reading posts about aiptasia, I thought that they were innocent little polyps....:confused: I had a brain coral that died about a month ago after he was in my tank for about a week or so. After just the skeleton was left, I noticed yet another small aiptasia on the bottom of him. Could the aiptasia killed my brain? Those little ba$tards :mad2: !!! I know that I need to get rid of them. How can I remove the two that are on my living cup coral? Should I just pull them off with twezers of something? If they burst would that cause them to spread? I don't want to use any chemicals because I dont want to harm my cup coral......

[eyedoc]

If you inject them with lemmon juice that might not harm the cup coral.

[JRic999]

Are you sure that I wont harm the cup coral if some of the lemon juice happens to land on it? Do I have to inject the lemon juice into the aiptasias mouth with a small needle or could I just squirt it on top of it?

[AReeferIsExpensive]

I used Joe's Juice and watched them die b4 my eyes....no more aptasia and now im prepared for another break out if it happens. What a useful $6.50~

[shilo_1]

How do u use the "juice" if u have about 100 minute little ones ?

[racrumrine]

I bought some live rock from a professional aquarium maintenance person and it came with a gift of about 100 small Aiptasia.

I already had two Cleaner Shrimp. I bought 2 Peppermint. 1 ate them, one didn't. The 1 whole ate them polished off all but 1 within 3 days. Then he was eaten by one of the Cleaner Shrimp. The other one didn't touch them. I bought another Peppermint Shrimp. For a few days, both of them were harrassed by the Killer Cleaner. Then, things settled down; but, the Peppermints still would eat the Aiptasia which by this time had grown back to around 10 in the tank. Then, based on threads I read on these boards, I tried the idea of stopping to feed this tank (right now, all my fish are in a quarantine tank). Well, after a few days, both Peppermint Shrimp started attacking the Aiptasia.

Knock on wood; but, I've been Aiptasia free for about a week.

Best of luck,

Roy

[James Yeung]

When I first saw them, I thought they were cool! The tank I acquired was infested with them! They attach themselves to corals and clams and started to sting them! They're on my green polyps and on my brain coral too! They're basically everywhere. It'll attach to anything!

It has taken me 2 months to bring the population down to a minimum!

Scraping them off, cutting their heads, etc. will just make matters worse!! I tried kalk paste, vinegar, boiling water and peppermint shrimps. My 3 peppermint shrimps did nothing. LOL!

For me, kalk paste works 60-70% of the time, depending on the location. If the aiptasia is looking straight up, mostlikely a good kill. But if the buggers are popping out from the side of the rock, forget it and incase the cave with kalk paste. It's also a 100% kill if you can cover the entire aiptasia (works with the really small ones). Becareful, don't get kalk paste on your corals. It'll burn them like it did to my brain coral (blasted power head kicked up some kalk). LOL!

Second, I use vinegar. That works well, but too hard to inject inside them. I just use a syringe with needle and squirt at the head. It'll shrink and I squirt hit them some more. The ones that can hide in the cave, I give it about 3cc of vinegar. But be careful with vinegar. I did it too close to my SPS and some areas didn't open for 48 hrs.

I like using boiling water (RO) the most! I use a 20cc syringe for the job. I squirt the buggers until they fall apart!!! Becareful with boiling water too! Hot water rises and may burn something unintentionally. Boiling water has its advantages since it won't screw up the pH, especially for small tanks or leave white paste behind. But it has it's disavantages and I only use it on live rocks, away from corals.

Anyway, that's how I kill them. The last two methods will take out some pods in the process (way to go! Take one for the team!).

I never tried Joe's Juice. Yuk! What a nasty sounding name.

BTW, I took some LR from my main tank and dumped it into my refuge. Of course the buggers were found on the LR. I was on a killing rampage but could not take 'em all out. I haven't done anything in more than a month and pretty much all the LR are now covered in them! They have caused so much trouble in my display tank, I may want to take 'em all out in my refuge just for fun with a Copper Band! :-)

James

[shilo_1]

The problem I have is that I have a pair of CBS. I guess I may just ahve to put them in th QT and put some peppermint shrimp in my display for a while and hope they get it under control.

The hot water sounds find, but theres no way I could get them all....if there are so many that I can see, I can only imagine how many there are that I CAN'T see ! (that thought scares me lol)