I've been fighting the war with aiptasia in my 90 gallon for about a year. I was brand new to the hobby when I started this tank and was actually excited (lord what an idiot I was) when these 'cool' little anemones started popping out of one of the rocks I bought. Once I learned what they were, I tried aiptasia-X on the biggest of them, but they were on a base piece of rock at an awkward angle so I couldn't get them completely.
Apparently, my botched attempts to remove them triggered a mass reproduction, and over the course of months, thousands (I do mean thousands) started popping up everywhere. On the glass, on the overflow, on every single rock, under corals, in the sump. They spread so far and so fast I couldn't get all of them.
I've tried: Lemon juice, aiptasia-X, joes juice, berghia nudibranchs (probably 700 bucks worth), peppermint shrimp and finally when I took all my rock out to catch two expensive wrasses that were fighting this week, I bought a propane torch and cooked as many as I could find. The smell was disgusting, but oh so satisfying. I tried a lighter, but a normal lighter doesn't get hot enough fast enough to really work
If you miss even a small piece of the foot, they can come back. I've blasted some with lemon juice (injecting with a small gauge syringe) and watched it melt over a couple of days, only to find 3 nearly microscopic versions growing around the perimeter of where the parent had been a week later.
I find a combination of lemon juice injected right in to the mouth or body works, but it works better if you carefully squirt lemon juice al over the tentacles as a second step as well. In close proximity the acidity seems to be able to denature their proteins before it dilutes too much. I usually then smother the collapsed aiptasia with kalk paste to really seal in the death.
The key is getting them before they spread, so if you're going to blast them, try and take the rock out to do it. When they're disturbed they can launch millions of cells in to the water to start clones on all your other rock, and the super tiny ones are too small to inject with anything, so you have to cover them with kalk paste (which kills everything else under it as well). If I had a time machine I would go back and take that one piece of rock out and boil it, even though it would have meant taking my tank apart.
Because of aiptasia I'm building the entire reef structure of the 320 gallon tank I'm building in my new house out of dry eco rock, and only putting in a couple pieces of new, religiously quarantined live rock to seed coralline algae.
I never thought I could hate an animal as much as I hate aiptasia.
|