Aiptasia control

wrote in message ...
Anyone used Blue Life?

I put a few drops on a few of the buggers, and looks like it kills
them. Any long-term effects? Any other products recommended?

The best product I can recommend is buing some peppermint shrimps.

Tried them; they don't work. Neither did copper-bands. I had one
actually eat flake food instead.

Of course shrimp will eat flake food - why are you surprised?

The copper-band is a butterfly fish. One could look it up.

I know what is fish and what is shrimp.
We were talking about shrimps originally and it was not clear
which was eating flakes causing your surprise...
In both cases they will prefer flake food as easy food source.
They will eat Aiptasia when hungry, so you need to limit feedings.

Note, Aiptasia will also eat flake food, so if you feed too much
and flakes float in the water you are feeding the pests, too...

In any event, I'd still like some feedback on the Blue Life, if
anyone's tried it.

Mike, are you the manufacturer rep? ;-)

I must have mistaken this group for one which discusses issues
surrounding reef tanks. I seem to have wandered into one where
people change questions to ones they can answer. My apologies.

You asked us for opinion - you got it:
we prefer NATURAL solutions over chemical war!
Any chemical product with unlisted content is a potential
danger in a reef tank. Anything which kills aiptasia chemically
will have detrimental effects on other anemones in the tank
and other cnidarians (corals). Aiptasia is just anemone, so
you cannot expect some chemical will be highly selective
and know which animal to kill. Yes, you use concentrate dose
to selected area, but the chemical stays in the tank in the
diluted form - if concentrate kills diluted form might make
the animals sick. If you use it a lot, to kill many aiptasias
you effectively poison your tank.

Shrimps work, you just do a mistake of overfeeding with flakes.
Stop feeding the tank for a week and you will see a progress...
Then do MINIMAL feedings every 3-4 days for couple of months
and let the shrimps do their thing - no chemicals required.
Aiptasia is a big problem in tanks where there is too much food
floating in the water for too long (frozen brine shrimp, flakes,
etc) and food is fueling aiptasia growth.

wrote in message ...
Wayne Sallee wrote:
The way to get coper-bands to start eating the
aiptasia, is to harass the aiptasia.

I am unclear on the concept of "harassing" an anemone
in order to get something to eat it.

Fully grown aiptasia is too big for shrimp or fish
to attack - they are affraid their stinging tentacles.
When you harass anemone the way it retracts or you
injure it causing it to stay retracted/deflated for
couple of days than you give the shrimps a chance
to eat it with no fear of being stung. This does
not apply to small, baby aiptasia - shrimps are able
to cause these to retract with sticking their
legs into the anemone body...

Also, consider the size of shrimp stomache...
If you have 2 small peppermints and 200 fully grown
aiptasias in a 200 gallon reef tank than do not
expect that shrimps will make a bid dent on the
population - you never allow aiptasia to take over
the tank - you need to act when first polyps are found.

Tell us more about your tank - do you have a pictures?
How big is the tank? Is it a reef tank or fish only?
How much live rock is there? How many aiptasia polyps?

Once the coper-band starts eating them, it won't
stop until it can't find any more.

That's what it does with flake food.

Then stop overfeeding the tank!
And switch from flake food to pellets.
Make sure every pellet is picked up by fish
and does not float into Aiptasia tentacles.

wrote on Tue, 30 Oct 2007:
Pszemol wrote:
The best product I can recommend is buing some peppermint shrimps.

Tried them; they don't work.

Yeah, I've got tons of Aiptasia too. My peppermint shrimp doesn't seem to
make any difference. Perhaps my tank is too big, and I need more of them.
Perhaps it's getting plenty of food from the fish leftovers. I don't know.
But I've never seen any specific Aiptasia in my tank disappear unless I kill
it myself.

-- Don
__________________________________________________ _____________________________
Don Geddis http://reef.geddis.org/
Why do programmers get Halloween and Christmas mixed up?
Because OCT(31) = DEC(25)

I havent tried Blue Life, and wouldn't try it myself personally. i
would never opt to use marketed off the shelf chemicals to biological
control. however i do have a remedy for this that does include a home
remedy chemical.

peppermint shrimp DO work, but patience is required. I guess i can
see in some cases, do to personality, shrimps may not quite have their
natural taste, but most of them love aptasia. Possibly take it back
and exchange it for another and tell the LFS its not eating your
aptasia. I use them for control too, when the pp shrimp died, about 4
months ago, the aptasia started coming back, he didn't get a chance to
off all the polyps. now theres about 40 of them in my tank at least.
its time for me to break out my remedy since i don't have money to buy
another pp shrimp yet.

what i use is lemon juice, i take a syringe and pull in about 1cc of
lemon juice and give them a dose internally. ya gotta be quick. dont
squeeze out more than 1/10th of that cc, usually it takes about 1/20th
of a cc, if you get it inside them. then you can stab the rest of
them until your cc is gone. if you have good alkalinity it will
buffer the acid. the tank shoudl be able to handle the additional
organics and process them, and its a relatively safe method.

when you get them good, you see their tentacles melt right off into
long hair like strings that go floating up into the water "VICTORY",
but usually its hard to get them that good. usually they retract as
they are dying. once they retract, if still visible, i stab them a
few times giving the about 1/50th of a cc per stab. this way i make
sure they will die. then theres those aptasia that are really fast,
or are buried deep in the rock, when you stab them they retract quick,
and all the low-dose of acid does to them is turn them into clear
aptasias but doesnt kill them. then after a few ore days you can take
another "stab" at them.

between peppermint shrimp, and the lemon/lime juice that should be
enough to decimate them. essentially, to eradicate, you would acidify
the large/medium ones before they spawn, and let the shrimp take care
of the small ones and newborns.

the syringe im talking about is a hypodermic needle as used for
vaccination shots or diabetics, etc...
note- i wouldn't use more than 1 or 2 cc's in a weeks time, your tank
will need time to process the organics and you don't want to grow any
undesirable algae, but that has not happened to me in all the years i
have been doing this.

also, i fully agree with pszemol, natural biological control is always
better than chemical control, in ANY circumstance, human or fish. but
butterfly fish will eat alot more than you bargained for, so i
wouldn't use this method, i would exchange the shrimp if possible, or
get more.

this is my answer to your question of "Anyone used Blue Life? "

p.s. i wonder if you tried to use a syringe for your product if it
would reduce surrounding carnage

I would be hesitant to try to limit feedings for the
coper-baned, as they tend to get skinny easily.

Wayne Sallee



Pszemol wrote on 10/30/2007 12:28 PM:
In both cases they will prefer flake food as easy food source.
They will eat Aiptasia when hungry, so you need to limit feedings.

Pszemol wrote on 10/30/2007 12:34 PM:
wrote in message
...
Wayne Sallee wrote:
The way to get coper-bands to start eating the aiptasia, is to harass
the aiptasia.

I am unclear on the concept of "harassing" an anemone
in order to get something to eat it.

Fully grown aiptasia is too big for shrimp or fish
to attack - they are affraid their stinging tentacles.
When you harass anemone the way it retracts or you
injure it causing it to stay retracted/deflated for
couple of days than you give the shrimps a chance
to eat it with no fear of being stung. This does
not apply to small, baby aiptasia - shrimps are able
to cause these to retract with sticking their
legs into the anemone body...

Yep, and also when the aiptasia start sending out
the digestive threads, the coper-banded will smell
it, and that will wet it's appetite for the aiptasia.

Wayne Sallee

"Wayne Sallee" wrote in message ...
I would be hesitant to try to limit feedings for the
coper-baned, as they tend to get skinny easily.

Sorry for not being clear - all my experience with
aiptasia war is with shrimps.
Never had copper band fish as they are not
so reef safe I would want them to be.

KurtG wrote:
wrote:
Anyone used Blue Life?

Sorry, I never used it. It sounds interesting.

I never heard of it until a couple days ago; there were 3 such
products in the monthly MarineDepot newslater, and I chose this
by process of elimination (my local LFS had Blue Life, and not the
other two.)

Came back today, and nothing looks wrong with my other corals, and
the aiptasia I treated are gone. I guess I'll do this a little bit
at a time and see how it goes, then do a water change soon.

We're actually a good group, but we've had persistent problems with
trolls, so please forgive us until we get to know you.

Actually, I've contributed off and on for about 6 years.

I also hang out on http://www.reefcentral.com/ It has a wide audience,
so you're likely to find somebody that has used it.

Thanks. I'll check it out.

Mike

Pszemol wrote:
wrote in message ...
Anyone used Blue Life?

I put a few drops on a few of the buggers, and looks like it kills
them. Any long-term effects? Any other products recommended?

The best product I can recommend is buing some peppermint shrimps.

Tried them; they don't work. Neither did copper-bands. I had one
actually eat flake food instead.

Of course shrimp will eat flake food - why are you surprised?

The copper-band is a butterfly fish. One could look it up.

I know what is fish and what is shrimp.
We were talking about shrimps originally and it was not clear
which was eating flakes causing your surprise...
In both cases they will prefer flake food as easy food source.

If you have a copper-band which eats flake food, you have
an unusual fish, as is noted in most of the literature.

Note, Aiptasia will also eat flake food, so if you feed too much
and flakes float in the water you are feeding the pests, too...

In any event, I'd still like some feedback on the Blue Life, if
anyone's tried it.

Mike, are you the manufacturer rep? ;-)

I must have mistaken this group for one which discusses issues
surrounding reef tanks. I seem to have wandered into one where
people change questions to ones they can answer. My apologies.

You asked us for opinion - you got it:

No, I did not get it.

I got an opinion on shrimp, which is available in all the standard
books.

Mike

Pszemol wrote:
wrote in message ...
Wayne Sallee wrote:
The way to get coper-bands to start eating the
aiptasia, is to harass the aiptasia.

I am unclear on the concept of "harassing" an anemone
in order to get something to eat it.

Fully grown aiptasia is too big for shrimp or fish
to attack - they are affraid their stinging tentacles.
When you harass anemone the way it retracts or you
injure it causing it to stay retracted/deflated for
couple of days than you give the shrimps a chance
to eat it with no fear of being stung.

When retracted, they are no longer interesting to the butterfly
fish, which typically begins eating the tentacles.

Mike