Entries about pests in general
Back in Jan 6th I posted a blog about how Aiptasias had apparently been eradicated from my tank, since I hadn't had peppermint shrimp for 2 months and no Aiptasias were found neither in my sump nor in my DT. Well, up until Oct 9th, when I added peppermint shrimp to the tank again no Aiptasias had appeared in the DT nor in the sump. But, on Nov 24th I spotted this in my sump: Yep, Aiptasia. So, either that one was hiding ...
Thursday as I was doing a quick water change I found a tentacled creature sitting on top of my first sump baffle glass.... looked like an aiptasia to me so I tried to suck it with the hose. It receded into the baffle and I lost it. A few minutes later I saw it drifting submersed in the water on the other side of the baffles, close to the return pumps, stout and tentacles all spread open, like a spider. This time I took it out with plastic claws (didn't want to touch it). ...
On June 4th at night I added two peppermint shrimp to the tank, and they gradually ate up all the Aiptasias. And there were a lot... but they got rid of them, all of them. Well, to be honest they ate all but one, the large, no, huge, Aiptasia you saw in a previous blog post. So I decided to manually remove than one and put it in a flower vase for my amusement. This picture was after a week it was in the vase, it climbed up from the bottom to that position: ...
In January I spotted one Aiptasia in the display tank, then shortly after another one. Bought some Aiptasia-X a few weeks later and killed them both. Well, two months later (March) I spotted them again... a large one on the substrate, and 3 smaller ones on the rock. The large one and one of the smaller ones were almost exactly where the two ones I killed in January were.... humm.... I re-read Aiptasia-X's instructions, applied it on them again, and gone they were (the four of them). ...