I have. They are very expensive. It is not worth the hassle of putting them in the tank and hoping they take care of it. The
aiptasia will come back. It is best to start with a pair and raise them. The only part that sucks about this is you have to farm the
aiptasia to feed the
nudibranchs since
aiptasia is there only food source. You really have to stay on top of it and change the water in the containers often. If you feed them and keep them healthy you have a good number of them to let loose in your system and they have a better chance of getting rid of the
aiptasia. If you keep the culture you can sell the
nudibranchs locally or pass them on in your local reef club. If you ever get another outbreak you can easily obtain more.
Raising them is easy, you can use shot glasses if you want. Use your tank water or water mixed to a
SG of 1.024. You will have to feed them to get them to mate so stick a few small or medium sized
aiptasia in the water. They are nocturnal so you will want to keep these containers in the dark or with minimal light. Try not to overfeed them and once again make sure the water is changed and clean for them. The eggs looks like spirals of small pin tips strung together. You take these eggs out and put them in a separate smaller container(shot glass size) to separate each brood. They will lay eggs several times. You will want to keep the containers covered since these guys like to crawl. They also crawl on the surface of the water...upside down, meaning they cling to the surface tension in the reverse. Really neat to watch! They are also very cool looking creatures and since they only eat
aiptasia they are reef safe. This is a process so it might take a while for it to take off, Id say about 3 weeks at the fastest.
Peppermint shrimp eat
aiptasia. I have seen several ways of coaxing them into eating aitasia. Feed the
aiptasia something the shrimp likes to eat is one way of getting them to eat
aiptasia. The way I do it and it seems to be a sure fire way of doing it, is to starve them. I know this seems cruel and mean but hear me out first. Set the shrimp in a
QT and don't feed it anything for at least 36 hours. After this time set him in your
DT after the lights have gone out. He will go straight to feeding on
aiptasia because he is hungry. He will clean your tank out in a couple of nights. The more of them you have the better. Of course the larger your system the more shirmps you will need.
You could also use
hot water(almost boiling), lemon juice,
kalkwasser, vinegar and there are a few commercial products, I don't have much experience with them but I hear Joe's Juice is good. Get a syringe and inject the
aiptasia with your concoction and they will turn black and fall off in a day or so. you will want to keep an eye on your water parameters to make sure you aren't knocking anything out of wack by putting this stuff in your system.
Hope this helps! I am actually looking for
Aiptasia for filtration if you want to get rid of any let me know!
