Berghia Nudibranchs

[marinekaos]

Suffering from aiptasia overload... does anyone know where we could buy/rent/borrow some of these little aiptasia munchers to help clean up our poor live (for now) rock. We are in the calgary area and would love to get a handle on this outbreak. Any assistance on locating the wee fellows would be appreciated. Thanks!

[freeze]

I used a syringe and lemon juice. Worked really well, and easy on the tank.

[ckmullin]

Originally Posted by freeze

I used a syringe and lemon juice. Worked really well, and easy on the tank.

+1 it nukes them gooood

[marinekaos]

thanks so much for the advice. We have so many tho' I'm not sure we could make much headway without making the environment too acidic with all the lemon juice we'd need to use.

[freeze]

It's actually not that bad, and when compared to how long it would take for them to be eaten. Generally it kills in one dose so if you did 5 or six a day and just add in an extra water change you should be okay. Just get a syringe inject it into the stem and give them a few mils. Check in it in a few days. You could also get something to adjust your ph if it starts to go up.

[asylumdown]

I would respectfully disagree on the lemon juice front. Aiptasia can reproduce from a single cell left behind, and it's basically impossible for the lemon juice to kill every cell. What is more likely is that from the bit of tissue that's left over you'll get two or three baby aiptaisa growing where there used to be one. The babies often move before they're big enough for you to notice them, so it might seem like you've killed it when in fact you've just spread the problem around. Not to mention the process often triggers the anemone to release its planaria, and it only works on the aiptasia you can reach with a syringe.

I broke my first tank down because of aiptasia. I tried everything, lemon juice, one of the strong acids, kalk paste, joe's juice, aiptasia X, I tried applying with droppers, injecting with syringes made for diabetics (buying those at shoppers is uncomfortable), taking rocks out and blow torching them, buying zappers that were supposed to fry them with electricity... months and months, hours and hours, and hundreds of dollars later I had so many aiptasia you couldn't see the rocks anymore. We were moving a couple months later but I got so fed up I broke the tank down way before I had to, there was easily 10,000 of them in a 90 gallon tank. Lemon juice will give you a temporary reprieve (I found it worked better than any of the commercially available products), but it won't eliminate them from your system, and the problem will just steadily grow. It's also horribly inefficient, human muscle power is probably the least effective way to try and keep an aquarium pest in check.

So long as you've not got any peppermint shrimps, berghia are almost a guaranteed bet. They're expensive as all get out, but considered against the lifetime cost of a reef tank, they're worth every penny. The only place I know of that commercially sells them with any consistency and ships to Canada is Salty Underground in the states. You'll pay an arm and a leg for shipping, but 20 of them cleared out my 275 in less than 3 months, and the system is now 100% aiptasia free, all without me lifting so much as a finger. I even made money on them selling them off once there were no more aiptasia. I bought 20, and I think I sold around 60. I wish I still had some, I'd give them to you. Apparently there's a couple Canadian sources, one in Ontario and one in BC that you might be able to track down here on Canreef, but Salty Underground is the only place I know that operates an online store with advertised dates of availability.

[marinekaos]

Thank you for your kind words and advice Asylumdown! We have just taken delivery of 5 little Berghia Aiptasia assassins and plan to release them shortly. I'm so glad my good man did not get to the point of using the blow torch (dipping live rock into a fresh water/lemon juice bath was as extreme as we got - with only temporary results)!

Wish us luck!

[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.

[asylumdown]

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.