Aiptasia Eating fish

Treefer32 · Sep 19, 2019

What is the best reef safe - non clam eating, non coral eating, reef safe aiptasia eating fish? I've seen aiptasia eating filefish but, from what I've read they're not necessarily reef safe and especially not clam safe. Is there anything out there that will deal with Aiptasia infestation.... Seems like I've got it bad... It's even growing on the sand bed.

Peach02 · Sep 19, 2019

No fish are garenteed to eat it and all have their downsides
1. Peppermint shrimp - May steal food from corals

2. copperband butterfly - will eat tube worms

3. Filefish - not sure on these unfortunately

Hamada · Sep 19, 2019

What size tank do you have and whats the live stock? iv'e used peppermint shrimp to get rid of all my aiptasia in the past.
Copper band fish and File fish are also known to eat aiptasia.

CheckeredPants · Sep 19, 2019

What size is your tank? Others have had success with Copper Banded Butterfly fish but they are hot and miss and require tanks over 100g. Aside from them I’m unaware of other fish that eat aiptasia.

Tft12 · Sep 19, 2019

I have 2 marginalis butterflies in two separate systems. They’re both extremely easy to care for and both eat aiptasia readily. They BOTH eat Derasa clams pretty aggressively.

Hamada · Sep 19, 2019

Peach02 said:
No fish are garenteed to eat it and all have their downsides
1. Peppermint shrimp - May steal food from corals

2. copperband butterfly - will eat tube worms

3. Filefish - not sure on these unfortunately

Ive used peppermint shrimp to get rid of my aiptasia but yes they were really annoying afterwords they would all ways dig into the mouth of my corals ripping and stealing the food from them.

Treefer32 · Sep 19, 2019

I've got a 350 gallon tank. 6 foot by 3 foot deep by 31 inches tall. Pretty lightly stocked for the size tank, Right around 13 fish right now. a larger wrasse, looks like a malnouris wrasse, 2 smaller wrasses, a shrimp goby with two pistol shrimp, a dragon wrasse, a fully grown black tang, a fully grown foxface rabbit fish, fairly small Bellas Angel, a small caribean blue tang (about the size of a fifty cent piece - he's the little tang that can though, he swims to keep up with my black tang constantly), Royal Grama, lawnmower blenny, starry blenny, canary blenny. It's a mixed reef of LPS, SPS, and some ricordia and a very large toadstool. A larger beautiful elegance coral I don't want to see damaged or stunted by lack of food. My goal is to have a nice big deresa Clam at some point. I have almost no tube worms, I was hoping they would start coming in at some point. Tank is around 10 -11 months old. No tube worms yet.

I've always heard it's extremely hard to get copperbands to eat in captivity. I've tried them with previous tanks and had issues getting them to eat anything. That'd probably be the safest. I've never tried marginalis butterflies. Gives me some ideas though! Which is what I needed.