Quote:
Originally Posted by lemon604
Get peppermint shrimps. My tank was plagued with aptasia before and I bought 3 berghias. They lasted about 2 weeks in my tank but the aptasia was still all over the tank. I bought a couple of peppermint shrimps and they did the job. I don't see a single aptasia in my tank after a month.
|
the #1 problem with peppermint shrimp is that your experience with them is not universal. You see as many posts from people who bought peppermint shrimp that went in to the tank and subsequently ignored every single aiptasia, even after watching them eat aiptasia in the store (as was true for me) as you do people who had success with them. There's too much else that they would prefer to eat given the chance, so unless you're extremely lucky, they're not a guaranteed control method.
One of the things they prefer to eat over aiptasia is berghia nudibranchs, so if you start with peppermints and they don't work, you've kind of torpedoed your chances for biological control unless you're willing to rip your whole tank apart getting the shrimp out. It's a much safer bet to try berghia first, as they're obligate predators and eat nothing else, meaning if they can reproduce successfully in your system they're a guarantee. If for some reason they don't work then try peppermints which have a much, much lower success rate but at that point you've got nothing else to lose.
Berghia have to be given time to reach critical mass though, which can make it seem like nothing is happening for up to 2 months. That was the case in my tank, 20 went in to a 275 gallon tank in November, and the aiptasia problem continued to get worse and worse until the end of December. Then all of a sudden, aiptasia started disappearing, first one or two would vanish over night, then 5, then 10, then whole rocks would be clear of them in a day. One berghia can't eat a large aiptasia by itself, but when they've reached 'critical mass' they travel in groups that can demolish 3 inch aiptasias in under an hour. If you have a heavily infested system, you will either need to buy a very large number of nudibranchs to start with, or wait until at least one, possibly two generations of young have reached near adult size to see any noticeable effect, and that takes much longer than 2 weeks.