Snorkeler's Cube

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:


A view from above:


This guy was resistant... unfortunately I didn't take pictures, but, it stayed in that vase for some 10 days without water change, temperature swings, no currents, no feeding nor anything comfortable. Several times it shrunk down, as if dying, tentacles dark and completely retracted.... only to "come back to life" a few hours later. Very impressive.

My guess is that as Oxygen levels were going down it would shrivel and "die", stop consuming Oxygen, then come back as new Oxygen penetrated the water again. Just my guess.

In fact, I think it moved upwards because of that.

I thought about taking this to my office, using it as a "hyper-simple marine aquarium" but then dismissed the idea. I knew the office cleaners would eventually spray ammonia-based cleaners on it so why waste effort taking this to the office if it wouldn't last long.

So what did I do with it?

Well, after the shrimp had eaten up all the Aiptasias in the DT I though "hey, why don't I put this guy back in, and feed them with it?" Sounds crazy enough? Well, yes, I did just that. On June 24th I dumped it back in.

No, not kidding. I really did it. Look, it is just a type of live food if you have Aiptasia-eating peppermint shrimp in your tank, right?

I never saw it again. Neither did I see any other Aiptasia (today is almost one month later). It must have been devoured by the shrimp, I'm sure they were happy with me . They didn't eat if before probably because it was too strong, all open, but when I dumped it in again I'm sure it was weak and shriveled up. Tasty meal!