Lets discuss my losing battle with aiptasia please

KrisReef

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About six months ago I purchased a lobo from an online vendor ( aiptasia has completely taken over every square inch of the entire tank.

After wasting $600 o

My next effort was to locate a source of bigger peppermint shrimp. This time I ordered 20 of the sucke

My most recent and final attempt was the addition of a file fish from biota. After getting

So my question for you guys is, where do I go from here? Any advice would be appreciated because i'm at a loss on this one.
A little commiseration and a tiny morsel of free! advice:

I've had off and on Aptasia battles and spent a few dollars like you on these cures. They all can work and I hope you find the magic bullet for your system.

I don't know how much you feed or how often, but these filter feeders will get out of hand really quick if they are eating well. Cut back on the rations going into the system. That will slow their population growth and increase the appetites of those lazy Peppermint shrimp.
 

Mjl714

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GJak

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A little commiseration and a tiny morsel of free! advice:

I've had off and on Aptasia battles and spent a few dollars like you on these cures. They all can work and I hope you find the magic bullet for your system.

I don't know how much you feed or how often, but these filter feeders will get out of hand really quick if they are eating well. Cut back on the rations going into the system. That will slow their population growth and increase the appetites of those lazy Peppermint shrimp.
Yeah that's another thing I did when they started to get out of control. I always fed the tank twice a day, pellets and flake mix in the morning and a variety of frozen later in the day. I cut down to feeding the tank once a day in the morning and it didn't make a difference. The tanga started looking skinny and the aiptasia kept multiplying so I had to go back to my normal feeding schedule.
 

RobMcC

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I had the exact same thing happen to me. Tried the same remedies in the same order as you did (Berghia can be great, in fact i used to breed and sell them to pay for the hobby). However, fast forward a few years to a new location and my wrasse just saw them as a delicious snack. I did solve the problem with this guy. He is ‘mostly ‘ good with LPS. If a coral doesn’t puff up for whatever reason he will eat it, especially scoly and acan. Anyway , good luck.
 

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GJak

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Here's a super cool video of my file fish looking at all the aiptasia he won't touch.....

I'm going to trust vette on this one and track down the correct Kleini and hopefully i'll get lucky. I really don't want anymore fish in the display and the two powder tangs always tend to make it hell on a newcomer. Fingers crossed though.
 

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Mjl714

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Here's a super cool video of my file fish looking at all the aiptasia he won't touch.....

I'm going to trust vette on this one and track down the correct Kleini and hopefully i'll get lucky. I really don't want anymore fish in the display and the two powder tangs always tend to make it hell on a newcomer. Fingers crossed though.
I look forward to hearing of your success.
 

RobMcC

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Here's a super cool video of my file fish looking at all the aiptasia he won't touch.....

I'm going to trust vette on this one and track down the correct Kleini and hopefully i'll get lucky. I really don't want anymore fish in the display and the two powder tangs always tend to make it hell on a newcomer. Fingers crossed though.
I also have a PB with my CB. They get along fine. The CB cleared several hundred aiptasia within maybe 2 days after adding
 

vetteguy53081

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You want copperband butterfly. Watch out for other fish picking on it they get finicky
Copperband finicky and if it doesn’t eat aptasia will turn to corals.
 
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GJak

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Could you put your Berghia predators in an observation tank and give those another go?

I tried for two solid weeks to catch that coris wrasse, its impossible. I mentioned earlier that I had set up and camera and watched the wrasse every time I added the berghia. Even when they were out in the open, crawling around I never saw the coris interested in picking at one. He loves to pull spaghetti worms out of the sand during the day so I considered him the most likely suspect but the nudi's come out at night when the wrasse is sleeping under a rock in the sand. I don't know what's eating them, just that I see a few of them at night for a few days and then they are all gone by the end of the week every single time I put them in.
 

KrisReef

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I put in a butterfly (“Reef safe Individual ”-according to the LFS guy) .....
I got him out before he Totally killed a few different frags ( scans, torches, etc).
I hope you have better success with your new fish. :) May he eat aptasia voraciously and no other coral items.
 

Mjl714

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I tried for two solid weeks to catch that coris wrasse, its impossible. I mentioned earlier that I had set up and camera and watched the wrasse every time I added the berghia. Even when they were out in the open, crawling around I never saw the coris interested in picking at one. He loves to pull spaghetti worms out of the sand during the day so I considered him the most likely suspect but the nudi's come out at night when the wrasse is sleeping under a rock in the sand. I don't know what's eating them, just that I see a few of them at night for a few days and then they are all gone by the end of the week every single time I put them in.
I’d agree, of all the fish, the wrasses have got to be one of the toughest to catch.
 

Mjl714

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I put in a butterfly (“Reef safe Individual ”-according to the LFS guy) .....
I got him out before he Totally killed a few different frags ( scans, torches, etc).
I hope you have better success with your new fish. :) May he eat aptasia voraciously and no other coral items.
What species of butterfly were you trying?
 

KrisReef

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What species of butterfly were you trying?
Klein’s. The biggest issue in my case was that the LFS person swore that the individual I was bringing home was a proven reef safe fish. Maybe it had been? In my system it didn’t eat aptasia but it was happily eating coral. Hopefully you will have a better experience? Thus far your efforts with aptasia-vores looks a lot like my experience with this Butterfly fish.
 
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Interesting read. You have some lessons learned especially about the wrasses and berghia's. Peppermint shrimp also as I ran into your issue. Ordered 3 and when they arrived they are maybe at best 1/4" in size. My copperband made short work of them.

Copperbands are nice. Not a 100% guarantee. Potential for other corals at risk. Advanced fish due to eating. I have one and it dislikes aiptasia. In fact it dislikes every food I try, and I try a lot, but loves all the pods. Since it is the only source of pods in the tank he/she is fat (I do not tell it to his/her face) and happy :) So it is an option but not sure fire.

Peppermints are solid but you need the right size and number. The starting number isn't 1 nor 33 but somewhere in between so they have their work areas. They are also opportunistic feeders as you found out. I personally have seen them rip food out of my elegance coral when I feed them so usually avoid them. I just introduced a pair and they seem to be doing so so.

Matted file fish. They work. I disagree about the BIOTA comment earlier in the thread. Yes, they eat prepared food but they also go after aiptasia. I've had 100% success rate with BIOTA's but there are a few notes here. 1 - they are small. At least the one I ordered was. Maybe the size of a US quarter coin at best. In the display, over the weir, down the plumbing, into my sump. Happened twice before enough was enough. Threw together a 5 gallon emergency tank, some rubble, light, and that was his/her home for the next month until it grew. They do grow fast which was nice so about a month later give or take an extra week in the display it went. Picked on the spores first. Small to medium size stalks. Left the large ones alone but kept them in check. Only issue:

1. Ate my duncan
2. Ate my frogspawn

Too bad because it was doing its job and doing it well. The issue was the duncan and frogspawn are small frags and couldn't out compete the filefish nips. I had a larger hammer coral it would nip but it was able to withstand it. So because of this, and I wanted the corals to get larger, I returned the filefish to a LFS and that was that. Aiptasia is back.

My take is this. Using any of Mother Nature's natural predators is going to take a bit of time. None of the solutions noted in this thread will go from tank introduction to 0 aiptasia in a few days :) Didn't say anyone said that but just reminding everyone. Berghia, peppermint, matted file fish, sunburst, or others will all take time. Others I've read about are the Racoon butterfly and Australian Stripey (Sea Chub).

More importantly Mother Natures little helpers are also subject to the delicacy of any and all LPS flesh. I personally find a balance or what is acceptable for me as a side effect to manage the pest.
 

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Haven't been on the boards much this year with all of the adulting things taking priority but I need some opinions here because I'm on the verge of losing my display tank.

About six months ago I purchased a lobo from an online vendor (I'm not going to name names here, that isn't the goal of this thread) that was not exactly true to the picture of the coral. When it arrived, half of it was covered in bubble algae on the part of the coral that had died had a receding skeleton showing. There were also numerous pests that showed up in the bowl after it was dipped, flatworms, astarina's and all other manor of things that I did not want to introduce into my tank. Against my better judgement, hoping that I could bring that beautiful coral back to a healthy state, I put it into the display after scrubbing the base and manually removing any other undesirable hitchhiker I could find. Fast forward six months, my tank now has bubble algae issues but the worst part..... aiptasia has completely taken over every square inch of the entire tank.

It's on the power heads, the return nozzles, its growing on the sand, every little crevice of every rock is just completely covered in aiptasia and it is choking the life out of every single coral it touches. When i first saw it pop up, I tried super gluing over them, bought a majano wand, injected them with kalk past, anything I could do to smother one out as soon as i noticed it. That worked for a short time but over the last month, the ones that I couldn't see or couldn't get to have just exploded into the state it is now.

The first thing I tried was of course berghia. Spent $300 on 20 full sized adult nudis. Made sure to transfer each one into the crevice of my zoanthid garden rock because that was where the aiptasia was doing the most immediate damage. After i put them in the first day, I never saw a single one again and the aiptasia continued to pop up everywhere. Figuring that maybe the zoanthid garden was too close to the power heads and maybe the nudis didn't survive the flow, I again purchased another batch of adult nudis and spread them out this time, a few in deep crevices on each of the rock structures in all different parts of the tank. I watched every night for a week. For the first couple of nights, I'd see one here or there but within a week, again they were never to be seen again. My own guess is that maybe the coris wrasse is picking them off but I've watched the tank and even put a camera on it following the latest addition of berghia and I've never seen him try to pick one off, even when they are out in the open.

After wasting $600 on what I thought was the best option to try first, I purchased 5 peppermint shrimp. When they arrived, they were a lot smaller then I was expecting and I watched them get picked off one by one by either the wrasses or tangs as soon as they popped their head out of the rocks. It was like I just dumped some frozen mysis in, they went straight for them and that was that.

My next effort was to locate a source of bigger peppermint shrimp. This time I ordered 20 of the suckers and made sure they were all full sized adult shrimp. I put them all in the display at the same time and the entire batch of them immediately swam to the zoa garden and set up shop. They had the entire two clusters of rocks completely clear of aiptasia within three days. The kicker here though, they haven't ventured off of those two rock clusters on the right side of the tank for two months. They are happy to just hang out there and eat whatever they pick off when I feed the tank and will not under any circumstance, go after any of the other aiptasia in the tank. I even tried to make them uncomfortable there by putting a flash light shining on those rocks at night in hopes they would want to hide from the light and seek shelter in another part of the tank but they don't. They just huddle together in the zoa's themselves and hide. I've bottled trapped some and move them to other rocks, they always end up right back in a group in the same spot.

My most recent and final attempt was the addition of a file fish from biota. After getting harassed by the angel and tangs for two weeks, he finally had enough courage to venture out and join the population. That was about two months ago and I haven't seen him even look at a single aiptasia much less try to nip at one. He is also happy to just eat whatever I feed the tank and nothing else. Doesn't nip at corals either, just swims around, hangs out under my scraper occasionally and that is it.

So my question for you guys is, where do I go from here? I have a considerable amount of money in my display tank right now and I am about to lose the entire thing to this aiptasia explosion. I feel defeated and I don't know what to do. The only thing I can think of is to set up a second tank, salvage any coral I can frag or remove without damage and nuke the display. I really don't have the time or energy for something like that though. What would you guys do in this situation? Any advice would be appreciated because i'm at a loss on this one.
Copper band butterfly fish! It worked for me. I had a bad outbreak and within 2 weeks the fish consumed it all. Very important to purchase live clams (I like Middleneck) and add one to the tank per day to get the butterfly to start eating. The other fish will enjoy the clams as well. Soon the butterfly will eat frozen foods as well. I have had mine for several months and is one of my favorite fish.
 

TX_Punisher

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Franks tanks f aptasia worked for me. I have a file fish as well but all it does is eat pellets.
 

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