Berghia Nudibranchs -Anyone tried these???

a group of people in the club tried them last winter and they all just died off. but jb had great luck with his copper banded and also people have had good luck with the larger breed of peppermint shrimp that carries pink eggs and does not have a spot of purple in it's tail, the type that does not eat as much aptasia is the opposite and has green eggs.

 

if you need some aptasia just let me know ill get you some from the store

 

i wonder if you got lysmata rathbunae and not lysmata wurdemanni, the latter would be the true peppermint shrimp and the kind that eats aptasia. if you get those berghia and they don't work out, i'd hunt for the right shrimp.
i would talk to a few club members before you order them, JB tried the same thing you are doing, along with a handful of other people and they all just wasted away.

 

FWIW I've always had good luck with peppermint shrimp from SOM. Sometimes it takes a week or two before they find the first aiptasia, then they seem to go to town on them.

Anna

 

Sounds like there's a lot of hit and miss. I too, have tried peppermint shrimps with no luck. I got a CBB ~6 months ago and my tank has been free of aiptasia and tube worms. I never see him eat anything but he's still alive and looks healthy. And I have never seen him pick on any coral.

 

Robyn,
Here's my aiptasia story...
Early this year, my tank was so overrun with aiptasia that I was actually considering getting out of the hobby because of it. It seemed like everything that I did to try and treat them lead to them coming back a few weeks later in even greater numbers.
After doing a lot of reading about "Berghia" being the only shure fire cure to Aiptasia, I decided to give them a try and organized a group order at our January club meeting. I ended up getting 6 of them (at @ $15 each) with the intention of breeding them to make my money back. I found that it was actually pretty hard to find aiptasia for them to eat even though my rocks were covered with them. There simply wasn't any that I could get to easily. After about 3 weeks, I had already lost 3 of the 6 and decided to just cut my lossed and put them in my display tank.   I placed the 3 survivors in my display tank and never saw any sign of them again.   My aiptasia problem was completely unaffected.  I'm pretty sure that they became very expensive food for other tank inhabitants.
So, after doing a bit more reading, I came across a product called Aiptasia-X from RedSea that was cheaper than "Joe's Juice" and getting better reviews.   I decided to give it a try and ordered 3 bottles of it.   I treated my infested 125 with it twice.  One day I treated every aiptasia that I could see and a couple days later I treated all of the stragglers.    This stuff was majic.    After the treatment, the Aiptasia stayed dead and did not rebound at all.   Usually they release their larva when you try and kill them making the problem worse a few days later.  Aiptasia-X fools them into thinking they are feeding, so they actually ingest it and get sealed up and implode before they have a chance to release any larva.  Both treatments only took 2 bottles total, so I still have one unopened.
So, I attribute most of my success in the war on aiptasia to that product.
However, there were still numerous aiptasia in my tank that I had no chance of reaching without damaging coral colonies, so I needed another solution to complete the irradication.   This is where the Copperband Butterfly came in.   I saw a nice copperband for sale one day and I noticed that he was actively feeding and picking at the rockwork in the shop.   This indicated to me that he was probably healthy and would eat in my tank.   Once he was in my display tank, it didn't take long at all for him to start picking at the rockwork which he still does constantly.   It's worth noting that he is the only fish in my tank that has no interest in flake food, so I have to make sure and feed frozen brine/mysis periodically.   The other cool thing about this fish is that it appears that it eats those annoying red flatworms as well.   I used to have a TON of those on my rock work, but since adding the copperband, they have completely disappeared.  I haven't read about them eating flatworms anywhere, but I don't have any thing else to attribute it to.
Today I have ZERO visible aiptasia in my display tank that was completely overrun 6 months ago.   There are a ton of them in my overflow still, but I really don't care about that.    I can't swear that the berghia's didnt' have something to do with the aiptasia disappearance, but I hightly doubt it.   If there were still berghia in my tank, I believe they would have found their way into the overflow and killed those aiptasia by now.
So... Thumbs up to both CBB's and Aiptasia-X.   Thumbs down to berghia's.
-JB

 

I didn't have luck with the peppermint shrimp either. (not sure what color of eggs they carry because I never see them)

Home made kalk paste seems to work pretty well for me.... I think it is basically the same thing as Joe's Juice. ( I know you aren't able to reach them, but maybe you could hook a syringe to some airline tubing or something.)

 

That's great to hear Robyn

 

Good to hear. So is the CBB eating any of the food you put in the tank? i hear they can be hard to keep alive once the live food is gone.

 

Mine will eat anything frozen. It won't eat flake at all.

-JB

 

I love the looks of the Copperband Butterfly.

--AJ