thinking about berghai nudis

I purchased an aptasia eating filefish to try to control our aptasia problem. He has actually done a really good job in our SPS tank....HOWEVER our NPS as you can imagine is over-run with them. I have just moved him to the NPS tank, however I am thinking we have hundreds of them in our system and filtration right now

The amount of food that NPS takes, is so much that we are bound to have aptasia all over the place. Unfortunately the aptasia is so bad now that it is stinging our corals, esp our spider sponge and sea fans. Most corals do poorly with aptasia stings...........these 2 are actually dying because of it. Plus you cant treat these with typical aptasia treatments, as the treatment will kill them faster than aptasia.

So am thinking of getting a bunch of berghai and starting a very small breeding system for them. We will have no problems getting aptasia as you might guess and if all goes well, will always have a fat happy supply

I have been doing some reading up on what is needed, etc, but was wondering if anybody has had any success/failures with these.

 

Following!

A gal in S. Cal used to have a breeding system set up for them.

That is all she did was breed them sell and or trade them. If you purchased one and it did the job you could return it so it did not perish from starvation.

 

I would get some aptasia eating peppermint shrimp. Mine do a fantastic job of controlling aptasia.

 

Unfortunately peppermints sometimes become opportunistic eaters. They will go after LPS corals as well as smaller anemone types like Maxi-minis. This is not true in every case but common enough. Mine ate all my Maxi-mini anemones in 72 hours, not a thing I could do about it.

They do a great job on aptasia but they carry a risk. Once they begin eating your corals they will not stop unless removed from the tank.

 

plus not all peppermint shrimp will actually eat aiptasia.

We have so many in our back of your system, that we need to be able to put one or 2 back in the sump area alone and let them feast

what the plan is, is to set up one of our 20g tanks with a ton of aptasia rocks etc and start breeding our own. Unfortunately with our NPS tank, we will never run out of aptasia to feed them and with a life cycle of less then 10 months we will need to keep our own supply up

There is a local gal that breeds them in St Louis so it makes it easy for us to get our start up supply. Hopefully we will get a good breeding program up and can kick this problem.

On a side note, i think our aptasia eating file fish was eating some of our corals in the other system......particularly our plate coral. He had been picking at the sand and the bottom of the tank and now our once healthy plate is looking very poor and no PE anymore. That is part of the reason he was moved and looking into the berghai