Success killing Aiptasia with Lye

[GoFish]

If anyone has an Aiptasia problem and have tried other methods with little or no success here is yet another way to try.
Lye. It has many uses from soap, to biofuel, to drain cleaner, to Crystal Meth, to killing Aiptasia. Sounds like a crazy thing to put into your tank right? That's what I thought, but it worked.

Please don't hold me responsible for any ill effects this method has on your tank or inhabitants, use at your own risk. There are several articles about this on other forums, please research further and don't just trust me, haha

Items needed...
40 grams of pharmaceutical grade Lye (Sodium Hydroxide NaOH)
1 litre of water (I used RODI)
Adequate storage container (Nalgene type containers are apparently the best)
Small Syringe (5ml)
Medium syringe (25ml)
Safety safety safety! Goggles, gloves, mask, ventilation, etc when mixing (it's dangerous stuff)

This ratio of water to Lye makes a 1M solution, some people have used stronger solutions with the same or better success, but I found this to have a 100% success rate in killing them.

If you're going to make the solution yourself please do some research on the safest way to do so.

Method:
Once you have 1 litre of 1M solution made up, you don't don't need this much, you can do some math and make less if you prefer. Such as 4 grams of NaOH to 100ml of water. Now I used a 5ml syringe with a small stainless hypodermic needle. Turn off all flow in tank (return pump, powerheads). Now take aim at the little buggers. You dont need to inject them with any sort of precision, or with a large amount of solution, just make sure you get the solution on the flesh of it. The stuff comes out clear but will soon turn cloudy and form a little cocoon around the subject. Make sure you don't get this stuff on any neighbouring corals, they won't be happy. This is where the second medium or large sized Syringe comes in handy, if you inject too much then use the other one to suck up the excess. Now just let I sit there for a bit, I read some where you can wait a few seconds, I personally let it sit for 20 minutes with the flow off. After that 20 minutes I used the larger syringe again to go over and pick up any excess cloudy cocoons I didn't want floating around. Turn pumps back on and that's it. It been 8 days since trying this on a handful of Aiptasia and there is zero sign they will be coming back.

Warnings:
This solution also kills Coraline algae if you care, also as mentioned will kill most or all corals, it has an effect on PH and Alk, but in such small amounts is most likely insignificant.

Here's an article about it.... http://www.reefscapes.net/articles/b...a_control.html

[christyf5]

I've also done this, with a weaker solution. Its the only thing that worked for me out of all the commercial solutions and the aiptasia zapper thingy. Eventually my filefish started to eat them but he wouldn't eat any of the larger ones so I had assist in getting rid of those ones.

[mihaivapler]

I used vinegar to kill them,100% safe don't like to try dangerous chemicals in my tank,one small mistake and you can kill a lot of stuff..i just have a seringe and just blast the vinegar right in the mouth of the aptasia,some of them die at the first shoot some require another one but i kill all of them,had about 10 small ones and 4 huge ones..also all the extra vinegar it just act as extra carbon for the bacteria...

[PithyArtifact]

I just used a peppermint shrimp. Just used 1 and killed around 20 heads of aiptasia in 2 days

[DiscusZ]

I used peppermint shrimp too and the dozen of aptaisia I had were gone in days even the large ones I couldnt get to with kalk paste

[hillegom]

Originally Posted by DiscusZ

I used peppermint shrimp too and the dozen of aptaisia I had were gone in days even the large ones I couldnt get to with kalk paste

+1