View Single Post
  #9  
Old 06-28-2013, 05:27 AM
asylumdown's Avatar
asylumdown asylumdown is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Jan 2010
Location: Calgary
Posts: 1,806
asylumdown is on a distinguished road
Default

well, this is super unscientific, but so far the results are very interesting. C'mon people, keep voting!

as for my experience:

90 gallon aquarium was over-run with aiptasia. By the time I broke it down, I had probably close to 10,000. I tried:
joe's juice
Aiptasia X
Lemon Juice
One of the strong acids (sulphuric I think)
Peppermint shrimp
Removing every single rock and blowtorching all aiptasia I could see
Aiptasia zapper
epoxy

None worked, either they made the problem worse, or the logistics of it made the method irrelevant to me. For example - watch the videos online of the Aiptasia zapper. The aiptasia that are clearly killed are always in the most convenient locations. If you have even one aiptasia on the underside of a rock you can't reach, or footed deep in a crevice, the device is useless. Same thing with injectables, they only work if you can reach the nem well enough to kill it completely, and more often than not they seem to be located in places where you can't guarantee a complete kill. By the time the problem was extreme enough to break down the whole rock scape, take everything out of the water and blowtorch it, there were so many that there was no way I could get them all without sterilizing everything, and I was right back to where I started a month later. By the time I bought berghia, I already had peppermint shrimp in the tank (which for me didn't eat a single hem), and the berghia didn't work. I can't say for sure why, but I suspect the peppermints ate them. After around $2500 and probably a hundred hours of effort, I broke down the system.

Second tank, aiptasia were introduced by accident. They spread rapidly. I tried to disturb them as little as possible, and when there were around 50-100 visible I ordered 20 berghia nudibranchs. 3 months later there wasn't a single aiptasia in the system. I've been aiptasia free since February. For me this is the method I'd use again, but I'm one person and therefore am an anecdote, so hopefully more people vote and give a better picture of what can work and what clearly doesn't.
Reply With Quote