Berghias - am I in an infinite Aiptasia loop?      6/19/18
Hi all,
<Hey Marcos>
I have a huge infestation of Aiptasia (by the thousands perhaps?) in my 250L tank, and decided to try the Berghias as all the other solutions didn't work (manually removing or killing the Aiptasia with shots of
anything is absolutely impossible at this point). I added 4 of them around mid-February, and for a while I thought they had just died, but recently I have been spotting lots of them, even with the lights on, also I've seen at least about 4 or 5 of these "egg spirals" as well in the last 2 weeks only, and I see the Berghias in a lot of different sizes (smallest being around 2-3 mm and the biggest being around 3cm,
<Wow!>
not sure if they'll get bigger), the population probably is over 30 of these if not more so far, I saw about
15 of them in daylight once and who knows how many are still hidden in the small orifices in the rocks or dead snail shells. It seems that they are probably eating very well, as they are reproducing relatively faster than I was expecting, but there are no actual visible signs of the Aiptasia population to be reducing, mostly the big ones, it probably is reducing but in a very slow rate so far (I think the Aiptasia at the bottom seem to be disappearing faster, maybe 10% are gone but those on the rocks are still there). I have some really huge Aiptasia (4cm or so or more) and even the biggest Berghias are a bit small compared to these. My Berghias aren't getting brown-ish as well (although they do have these darker spikes when they're past 1cm or so), which makes me think that they aren't overfeeding or something. They also seem to work in teams, I rarely see a single Berghia attacking a single Aiptasia but I've seen 4 or 5 Berghias around one once.
My question is... can the Berghias prefer to eat all the smallest Aiptasia first, leaving the big ones for later (if needed)
<Yes>
as they are probably harder to be eaten and can this make me to be stuck in a loop forever as the big Aiptasia aren't being eaten but at the same time these are also releasing new baby Aiptasia which is what the Berghias are actually eating, so the big Aiptasia will probably never disappear but will keep
making babies and just the baby Aiptasia are enough for keeping all my Berghias alive and thriving?
<Time will tell. I suspect the Nudis will get ahead of the curve at some point. I would bolster their efforts w/ Butterflyfish, Filefish addition/s>
Could this be just temporary, and as soon as the Berghias population really explodes in a couple more months (say, when they reach hundreds of them) they will eat most or all of the baby Aiptasia fast enough and will have to attack the big ones?
<I do think so; yes>
I'm not planning to add any other Aiptasia predator to make things go faster, I'll try to just let the Berghias do their job but it seems it will take a long time. Peppermint shrimps never worked fine here, and a
Copperband might be complicated to keep later when the Aiptasia are gone, the Berghias is just easier to keep.
TIA,
Marcos
<Thank you for sharing. One possible avenue to consider... selling the excess Berghia (over the Net, to stores, fellow hobbyists in clubs); and using the proceeds to replace all hard substrates, bleach, rinse, air dry the present and use as base. Bob Fenner>