Aiptasia is a known hitchhiker. Aiptasia enter the hobby by trading between hobbyists or even purchasing corals from your local pet store. Aiptasia can gain entry into our aquariums via rocks, frags, plumbing, water or any other matter from an infected tank.
Preventing them from getting into your tank in the first place may seem almost impossible. They can sneak past even the closest eye or remain dormant on corals or live rock for months in quarantine, only to proliferate once they become established in a display. There is even a decent chance that some of the tanks in the local fish store LFS you buy from could be infected with aiptasia.
To find out if aiptasia are present at your LFS, ask to check their sumps or overflow boxes; these areas receive the least amount of maintenance and so have a higher chance of aiptasia lurking within. Just be ready for their debut in your reef tank and for the battle to come. Unfortunately, there is no overnight cure for eradicating aiptasia. And depending on the size, it can take months to kill an aiptasia infestation.
There is no dip you can use when dipping coral or live rock that will just kill aiptasia. I will get into juicing later when I cover the eradication process.
When starting a new tank or rebuilding, aiptasia-tested hobbyists will often start with dry rock, which they seed with specific bacteria and coralline algae. This has great advantages, but it can limit the tank as to what you put in it.
Ocean-propagated maricultured corals are those least likely to have aiptasia on them. Keeping the coral or rock from transhipping moving from one tank to the next in the chain of custody makes it less likely for these corals to pick up hitchhikers.
Why let aiptasia, or any other pest for that matter, ruin our fun? Glass anemones another common name for these pests can reproduce both asexually and sexually, and they clone by pedal laceration. Pedal laceration is how they spread so quickly. Aiptasia do this by breaking off a piece of the pedal disc the base or foot , which quickly turns into a polyp. When spawning, aiptasia release gametes by the millions.
Once the gametes are fertilized, they become individual planula. Planulae settle on hard substrates and undergo metamorphosis into polyps. Aiptasia can also reproduce by sporing gametes or planulae while under attack. Also, a messy eater will scatter bits of aiptasia, which can lead to aiptasia blooms once the fish or shrimp is no longer in the environment.
Temperature has an effect on the sex of aiptasia. In the aquarium, they can become hermaphroditic — something not found in the wild. Temperature and light cycles affect their rate of reproduction. For aiptasia from more temperate seas, winter is their least active time, and summer is their most active time. If you choose this option, make sure all your fish and corals can survive under the desired conditions. Under laboratory conditions, a single aiptasia polyp has been shown to produce up to 5, clones of itself in a year!
They feed through a symbiotic relationship with zooxanthellae housed within their tissue; through photosynthesis the zooxanthellae create sugars and amino acids that provide energy for their aiptasia host. Aiptasia are also able to filter-feed by scooping up organic nutrients out of the water column with their tentacles. They move around when they are starved of nutrition and stressed, leaving behind a piece of pedal to ensure species survival. Aiptasia can slide across substrates with their pedal or can completely detach to find more suitable living conditions.
The aiptasia like to protect the pedal and will find holes and crevices on any porous parts of the rock they can quickly retract into.
This makes it impossible for fish and shrimp to remove all of the pedal. If part of the pedal is left, the aiptasia is not dead. Aiptasia are made to survive — plain and simple. Adjusting a couple of parameters can slow the spread of aiptasia in your system, thereby making an assault on the problem more manageable.
Begin by taking a tally of the numbers of aiptasia in your tank every two weeks. But if with each count the tally increases by five to 10 large aiptasia, with a lot of tiny ones besides, you may want to make some adjustments. If you are running your tank at 78 degrees Fahrenheit with the lights on for 12 hours a day, try reducing light by two to three minutes a day and adjust the water temperature by half of a degree per week.
Keep adjusting until you see a reduction in the appearance of new aiptasia. Keep in mind that if your tank is running at around 74 to 75 degrees, you can adjust the light to no less than six hours per day. Remember that this is a temporary fix to slow down the rate of aiptasia and not a permanent solution. Patience, my fellow reefers. You now know how and when they breed, plus what they are eating in your tank, as well as the places they like to hide. Keep trades to a minimum.
Know the tank they are coming from and keep an eye out for any hitchhiking glass anemones. Even lemon juice, vinegar, and kalkwasser paste are a common, cheap, and effective way to kill them.
Sometimes you need to call for backup. Luckily, the ocean has a predator for nearly everything with the exception of a few evolutionarily advanced creatures.
Aside from plain aggression and territorialism, predators in the wild do not kill to kill. They kill to eat. So what in the see eats aiptasia?
The Berghia Nudibranch is one of the only animals that relies solely on aiptasia for their nutrition. In a tank with no aiptasia you will starve a Berghia nudibranch very quickly.
The animals are small and not easily spotted. On average, If you see one aiptasia, there are 10 more hiding. This is why it is so hard to eradicate them manually. To completely rid your tank of these pests you need to start with about 10 nudibranches. No other species will work. If your tank is pretty populated with aiptasia the nudibranches will eat and breed until they have eliminated their food source, which is a great time to catch as many as you can and trade them to the next aiptasia infested hobbyist.
Nudibranches are predated by shrimp, so if you have peppermint shrimp as aiptasia control you will loose all of your nudibranches before they have a chance to populate and eat. Peppermint Shrimp are not as likely to eat aiptasia, but ones that do will eat them like crazy. Its common name, Nidubranch Berghia, is derived from this sea slug originally being published as being the reef friendly Berghia verrucicornis, which is found in the Mediterranean.
Though the scientific name has been corrected, the common name will most likely be retained in the aquairum industry, as it has become quite well established. Spurilla neapolitana and Baeolidia nodosa are a couple other Nudibranchs that may also be effective at eliminating aiptasia pests, but they may not be readily available.
It is believed that it may also snack on Aiptasia anemones, but how effective it is at eliminating these pest anemones has not yet been determined. However, shrimp are another group that you need to research before putting them in a reef tank. Many small shrimp will snack on a variety of invertebrates and corals as well as Aiptasia. Peppermint Shrimp Lysmata wurdemanni - Be careful with these.
They will consume Aiptasia anemones, but are also known to snack on Yellow Polyps, the small polyp sceleractinians. These species will also eat Aiptasia anemones, but because they will definitely snack on corals, they are not at all suitable for a reef tank. Chemical and Physical Aiptasia Control Regular and time consuming manual removal is often required so that an aquarium is not overrun by dense populations of Aiptasia.
Manual approaches include physical types of removal as well as chemical approaches. There are a some problems with both chemicals and physical methods of control. For example, the Aiptasia Genus can, quick as a whip, retract into its hole or crevice if it feels threatened.
This makes it hard to sneak up on to inject any of the various "cures" that people have come up with. It cannot be done by scraping them off rock, chopping them up, or crushing them.
This is because even a tiny piece of an aiptasia can quickly grow into a new full sized anemone. Tearing or breaking them up only serves to help them multiply much more quickly. Manufactured chemicals: There are a number of approaches using manufactured products as well as household methods that don't create a population explosion like physical removal can. Using chemicals generally involves taking a toxic liquid or paste and placing it onto or into the mouth of individual anemones, which the anemone then ingests.
Be careful when using any sort of chemical. Some chemicals can be caustic and some can quickly change the aquarium pH. There are several manufactured chemicals, usually they are lime and calcium chemical mixes, that are specifically designed to target and kill these anemones. There is not a lot of information about their effectiveness, but they are said to be reef safe products.
Household Methods: Household products people are said to have used like vinegar, liquid calcium supplements, and kitchen lye, should be used very cautiously, each has issues to be considered. Chemicals such as hydrogen peroxide, hydrochloride acid, or copper compounds should not be used. Latest Animal-World Fact Sheets. More Classifieds. Getting Rid of Glass Anemones. Advertise With Us. Brown Glass Anemone, Aiptasia pallida. Jungle's YouTube Channel - Reef. Glass Anemone, Aiptasia pulchella.
Report Broken Video One way of killing these pests Small Rock Anemone, Aiptasia diaphana. Report Broken Video Another pest anemone that comes in brown or pinkish. Trumpet Anemone, Aiptasia mutabilis. Report Broken Video Another species of Aiptasia. Klein's Butterflyfish. Threadfin Butterflyfish.
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