Aiptasia

Laura and Jim will be hosting the May meeting this Saturday the 12th and it will be the usual of food, drinks, raffle and fun.
 
Doors will be open at 6:00 pm for social talk and the meeting will start at 7:00.  Parking gets a little tight and the city says you can't park on 4th but there is a parking lot a block away.   Meeting is usually held in the backyard so feel free to bring your favorite lawn chair, weather permitting of course.

If you need address/directions, contact a club member.

Best if you park at Mini Mall (where the spaghetti establishment use to be)
 
You will get to see his new frag tank set up in the making.
 
Hope to see you there!

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[psa]

I took down the tank last night, scrubbed all the rock under lukewarm fresh water, sterilized the tank itself, removed the (thin) sand bed, sterilized all of the equipment in it, massively changed the water, and put it back together with snails and hermits as the only critters.  I don't expect to have eradicated the aiptasia, but with frequent water changes I hope to keep the nutrient load down (there will be some microbial dieoff yet from the freshwater scrubs and with so much new water probably some cycling) and manage the aiptasia as it pops up again.

We'll see.

[Rico]

When the aiptasia reappear, squirt them with lye.  It is the best roundup for reef tanks.  I use it to control aggressive corals, kill hair algae, mushrooms and aiptasia.

Go to the grocery store and pick up a pkg of Red Devil Lye in the drain cleaner section.  It is just Sodium Hydroxide, which converts to H2O when mixed in with the salt water.  The only precaution is to not use a lot in a small tank as it will raise the pH.

Rick

[psa]

Aiptasia in one of my nanos have been disappearing.  The only animals in there are a mithrax crab, an "eyelash" blenny, half a dozen "micro" blueleg hermits, and the 'pods.  I had a rock with clove polyps in there which had several small anemones that I hadn't noticed at first.  A week later I added the blenny and the mithrax.  Two days after that I went to inject the aiptasia, and they were gone.  I know they were there when I put the crab and blenny in.  Haven't seen them since.  There's nothing on the rock where they were.

When I overhauled the tank which has such a big aiptasia problem I had one rock with aiptasia in between the zoo polyps.  I did not attempt to clean it off because I'm a bit cautious when I deal with cleaning zoos.  Partly as an experiment, I put this rock into the nano where the previous aiptasia had disappeared.  In the evening there were half a dozen small polyps on the rock, the next morning there were none.

I suspect the crab, but only because he is the only thing in there that I can conceive of eating such a thing.  He also devoured the grape caulerpa that I had left on one of the rocks (I saw this).  Whenever I see him he is climbing around the rocks, scraping at it with those scooped claws of his.  He really does look and behave like a mithrax.

The nano grows algae on the glass wherever I don't clean it regularly.  I don't think there's a lack of nutrients for the aiptasia.  The coralline, clove polyps, and zoos are all quite happy, in addition to the previously mentioned livestock.