got ethical husbandry?

"How to kill Aiptasia" article

As the saying with mice, or cockroaches, or any pest goes, if you see one you got a bunch more you can't see. Aiptasia is one of those things that should just go into the same category as all the other mundane chores you do on your tank. Big ones are relatively easy to spot, but unless you have a sharp eye you can have a bunch of little tiny buggers that don't register as aiptasia to you. For me I tried to make sure when putting rock up, no rock was more than 3 rocks deep, meaning if I saw something bad on a rock on the bottom, moving 2 rocks got me to the rock I needed to remove. And every time I see an aiptasia, I pull the rock out, grab some cutters, cut off as much rock around the aiptasia as I feel is necessary, or if I scrape it off I give it a nice super glue coating. And back in the tank.

If my tank got super infested like one of those pictures, I'd probably break everything down and be done with the hobby though.
 
My boyfriend had GREAT luck with two different peppermint shrimp. He bought a tank off of craigslist that was COVERED in aiptasia (we only kept a few rocks alive and bleached the rest) but with just a few rocks there was easily more 40+ good sized aiptasia (Some almost quarter size). So we picked up a peppermint shrimp at lfs, named him Santa and left him in the tank without feeding him. Within a week all the aiptasia the gone. Unfortunately when we added snails to the tank he decided to eat them. I personally thought we just needed to feed him more but just to be safe we gave him back to the local fish store. A few months later in a new tank, we noticed a tiny aiptasia in a new clump of rastas. We picked up another peppermint shrimp named him Santa II. We left Santa and the rastas in a bucket for two days and rinsed the rastas. We have not seen any other aiptasia since then. Santa II now lives happily in the sump where he gets fish flakes and occasionally takes rides on the Chaeto.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top