Berghia Colony

ataller · Feb 15, 2026

I have/had quite the aiptasia problem in my display tank. Think the entire back wall was covered from top to bottom with aiptasia, thousands of them.

Peppermints (at least the ones I have) and an aiptasia eating file fish did not make a dent so I tried berghia.

I put 10 in and then 20 in and 6+ months later there was no change to the aiptasia I assume the nudis did not survive.

So I purchased another 5 and decided to breed them to get their numbers up before putting them in the display.

I have a small tank with an airstone and a heater.
I then scraped a bunch of aiptasia off the back wall and transferred them .

3/5 berghia survived acclimation in to the breeding tank.

Since then they have laid dozens of spirals, however, there is only one new berghia in there.
The two largest are about an inch long, quite big, the third is smaller maybe 1 cm, and the baby is now about half a cm.

Everything seems to be going well however it has been 2 months!

I keep the tank at 77, salinity at 35ppt, and there are dozens of aiptasia in there for them to eat.

Does anyone have any advice as to why I am getting such poor survival of the babies?
Does it usually take this long? Should I increase the temp? Lower the salinity?

I have now cleaned up the back and side walls in my display, but there are still hundred of aiptasia on the rocks I can't reliably scrape off.
I still have two patches I can harvest for food if need be.

Two months in I was hoping to have some nudi's to introduce into the display.

Thanks

Here is a picture of one of the big ones...

Jmp998 · Feb 15, 2026

I presume your eggs are viable-with a good magnifying glass and light you may be able to see larvae wiggling in the egg cases about a week after laying, and 10-14 days after the eggs are laid the eggs should all hatch and disappear. If the eggs are viable, it is possible something in your setup is not conducive to survival of planktonic Berghia larvae.

Try removing several egg spirals from your main tank, and place in a small cup of tank water with a few tiny aiptasia, and either agitate only with very minimal bubbles from an air pump (1 bubble per second at most), or just by gently stirring or pipetting the water in the cup 2-3 times per day. Minimal aeration/agitation increases the proportion of Berghia eggs that undergo direct metamorphosis to crawling larvae, rather than going through a planktonic stage, which may improve your yield.

Article link: https://dn721608.ca.archive.org/0/items/biostor-10348/biostor-10348.pdf

ataller · Feb 15, 2026

Jmp998 said:
I presume your eggs are viable-with a good magnifying glass and light you may be able to see larvae wiggling in the egg cases about a week after laying, and 10-14 days after the eggs are laid the eggs should all hatch and disappear. If the eggs are viable, it is possible something in your setup is not conducive to survival of planktonic Berghia larvae.

Try removing several egg spirals from your main tank, and place in a small cup of tank water with a few tiny aiptasia, and either agitate only with very minimal bubbles from an air pump (1 bubble per second at most), or just by gently stirring or pipetting the water in the cup 2-3 times per day. Minimal aeration/agitation increases the proportion of Berghia eggs that undergo direct metamorphosis to crawling larvae, rather than going through a planktonic stage, which may improve your yield.

Article link: https://dn721608.ca.archive.org/0/items/biostor-10348/biostor-10348.pdf

Interesting, I will try this, and see if I can get them to hatch into a crawling stage in a separate cup!

Thanks so much