melev

Nice article. I think one of the worst mistakes I made was allowing that social situation to control my judgement. I put an inbound rock gotten from a respected local reefer for the wonderful macro algae, into my RDSB. I didn't want to insult him by putting it in a bucket. Then I got busy and forgot about it for a couple days. When I went to check on it, I noticed a baby aptasia anemone. Rather than remove the rock (I was pretty new to this type of event), I tried to mess with it with a tweezers.

Right before my eyes, it ejected "fingers" and I watched as they swirled around in the RDSB, trying to net them out. Well, they gravity fed into my display, and withina few months I had a MAJOR problem. They had reproduced within the rocks only to be seen when the population was staggering. Really bad news in a very large reef!

My understanding is that the aiptasia products and lemon juice really work. Is that true? I have some that have popped even after I thought I had removed them from a frag I got.

the products work but aiptasia can spread quicker than you can kill it so keeping it from getting in the tank in the first place is the most effective way of handling it, I have had it "pop" back up after I thought I killed it before as well but when it popped back up i realized all i did was injure it, since my second attempt at killing it I have yet to see it back and that was about 8 months ago.

I have "tested" many aptasia products including lemon juice, vinegar, hot water, kalkwasser and name brand items. Absolutely NONE of them actually worked. Some people claim you can cover them with reef putty, but I didn't find that to work either. The only way IMO to remove them, is to remove the rock and cook it. And I mean actually cook it on the stove...

For my reef, much like Marc's current reef, it was impossible to do this due to the size of the tank and rocks. Even pulling a rock out and treating them in a QT DID NOT WORK. So what did work? I bit the bullet and got a Copperbanded Butterfly. Beautiful fish, and to this day I have no idea how that little fish erradicated literally thousands of aptasia, some much larger than the fish itself. Going forward, I propagated aptasia on rocks in the overflow, providing additional filtraton and an occassional snack for the fish. It worked very well, but again, there is a downside: They will eat every father in your tank.

I am sorry they did not work for you and I will say openly if you have more than a few you will get no where with a product but if you have a countable small number than you can kill them successfully with a product assuming you get to them quickly, otherwise a large number of them you might as well find a natural killer of aiptaisia, a quick side note is that just like not all peppermint shrimp will eat/kill it not all copperbands with either so to each his own