It's been almost two months since I added the Berghia nudibranchs and frankly I was starting to get a bit downhearted. Every day I'd check the tank for visible Aiptasia hoping to find just one less only to be bitterly disappointed every time. The Aiptasia numbers were growing rather than reducing. The Beast has been positively flourishing, flaunting its babies in front of me. Today though I discovered a tiny ray of hope. I actually found a Berghia still alive!!! What's even better is that is was sitting in the spot that an Aiptasia previously resided. Hallelujah! Maybe there is hope for Operation Aiptasia after all.
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It's been 2.5 months since I introduced the Ghost Cardinals and I am so glad that I did. They are all round lovely fish. Totally peaceful towards each other and the rest of the livestock, shoal together most of the time and eat frozen food with enthusiasm. They are also really, really pretty fish, my photos don't do them justice at all. The icing on the cake for me however, is that they've now started spawning.
On the 4th December 2020 I noticed that one of the cardinals had stopped feeding, his jaw looked distended and a different shape to the remaining four fish. I hoped that this was an indication that he was carrying eggs rather than being sick. He resumed feeding again after about 5 days I think, there was some disruption to the tank at the time so maybe he was too stressed or inexperienced to carry them to full term. On the 18th December, during a water change, I happened to notice two of the fish were separate from the rest. I glanced away for a moment and when I looked back again I caught one of them in the act of taking up an egg mass in to his mouth. I have previously observed Red Spot Cardinalfish spawning during a water change (in the Reefer 170), I wonder if the pumps being switched off is a trigger for the female to release eggs, perhaps it's easier (safer?) for the male to pick them up when he's not blasted by flow? I am yet to witness any babies. Perhaps the fry are released late at night or maybe he hasn't reached the point where he's felt confident/happy enough to carry them to full term. This week that he's carrying once again, maybe I'll be lucky enough to spot some babies this time... I've finally managed to capture a half decent photo of Mr Fantastic the Tigertail cucumber. He's rarely visible during the day but after lights out he can often be found stretching out on to the sand to feed. I have tried on a few occasions to take a photo but he's amazingly sensitive to light, one brief flash from the camera and he's gone. This time I set the camera to the smallest aperture (f32), manually focused the lens (a bit tricky in the dark), readied the flash and crossed my fingers. Fortunately it didn't turn out too bad. He's been with me for almost 6 months now, I assume he's finding enough food to eat because he's never strayed from the right-hand side of the tank and he's significantly bigger now. I couldn't tell you exactly how much bigger he is because he never shows his rear end. Whenever he pops out to feed he always has his bum anchored underneath the rocks for safety. This is totally fine by me as I don't want him climbing the glass and getting anywhere near the pumps. Ming the Pom Pom crab was also out and about so I took the opportunity to snap a picture of him too. He's such a fascinating and cool looking crab.
I've noticed recently that the two small gorgonian frags added at the end of September 2020 seem to have developed some strange elongated polyp tips which look a lot like sweeper tentacles. As far as I was aware gorgonians didn't produce sweeper tentacles but according to 'The Reef Aquarium, Vol 2' by Sprung and Delbeek some species actually can (Erythropodium caribaeorum and Muriceopsis flavida). So is this what I'm seeing here and if so why is it producing them? There is no obvious encroaching coral so I am currently at a bit of a loss. I'll have to keep watching them carefully to see how it develops.
Day 4: The Beast is getting bigger, I may have to break off the rock it's attached to at this rate. Of all the Aiptasia I have been keeping an eye on none have been touched yet. The egg spirals laid on the small piece of rock have vanished so something probably ate them over night, I'm feeling pretty gutted about that. Day 5: No change in Aiptasia but I can confirm that one of the nudibranchs is still alive, how do I know this? Well, I discovered one sitting on the silicone bead at top left corner of the tank first thing in the morning. Err, no there aren't any anemones to eat up there! The nudibranch stayed there all day along, at least it didn't get eaten. Day 6: No change and the Berghia is still in the same spot on the silicone, is it on hunger strike? I moved the small rock a little so that I could take a photo of some odd looking polyps that seem to have sprung up from nowhere (more on this later) but as I did that I discovered some more eggs spirals had been laid inside a hole. Hopefully these will be more protected from predation unless mini brittlestars have a taste for nudibranch eggs in which case they will be toast. Day 7 (today): The Berghia has vanished from the silicone, hopefully it's gone in search of a snack. No visible change in Aiptasia, well they did say it could take a while...
Day 8: Nothing new to report. I can't see if the egg spirals are still intact or not. I just wish that one tiny Aiptasia would vanish offering me at least some hope for the future control. Oh well I guess need to be patient a little longer. Yesterday I received the results of my latest ICP analysis and I'm relieved to say that the cobalt level has dropped to 1.71ug/l. It's still 17 times above the reference value so there is still a way to go before it's gone completely. I wonder if the drop is the reason for the recent turnaround of my Acropora hyacinthus?
Link to the latest ICP: //lab.atiaquaristik.com/share/5c6ace3e71c6dbce4bea Graph showing the ICP cobalt levels since the first test, the rock had been in the tank for 5 months at that point. It's now one week shy of being a year old. Despite my very best efforts, Aiptasia anemones have taken a hold in my tank. I tried killing any that I discovered with Red Sea Aiptasia-X but more often than not they just bounced back. I moved on to NT Labs Anti-Aiptasia, that proved equally useless. Some would say that the problem lies with me but no matter how carefully/stealthily I approached the anemones to apply the killing solution they would hunker down and reappear a couple of days later. I also tried covering them with putty but no matter how carefully and forcefully I squished the putty down around the Aiptasia they would manage to find a way around it. As things stand I have one rather large Aiptasia (aka The Beast; it looks massive to me) and more than a fair few tiny ones. In fact the more I look with a magnifying glass, the more I find. So basically I've come to the conclusion that they are everywhere and if I don't do something soon it's going to get a lot, lot worse. It's time to get serious about this. Plan A: Berghia nudibranch. These tiny sea slugs eat Aiptasia and only Aiptasia so are guaranteed to do the job if they survive long enough. The recommended number to add is 1 Berghia per 50l of water with a minimum of 3. My system is approximately 380l so I would need 8. Also there is a risk that wrasse might try and eat them even though they taste bad so it's also recommended to add an extra one in case one gets sampled. Now I have 3 wrasse, I can't imagine that the Pink Striped or Possum wrasse would eat them but the Yellow wrasse certainly might. I opted to order 10 to cover all bases. The little guys were delivered on Tuesday 19th January from Berghiaonline, they were packed in a box with a heat pack which was still toasty on arrival and they all looked to be in good condition. Somehow I expected them to be bigger but in reality they are quite small. I took extra care with acclimation because firstly, I wanted to maximise my chances of them surviving and secondly, I wanted to wait till the Yellow wrasse went to bed before introducing them. When transferring them from the pot to tank it's important not to scrape them off as this can damage them, instead it's recommended to use a pipette to dislodge them before sucking them up and depositing them in the tank. However the best and easiest way of adding them is to just place the whole pot in the tank and let them move out when they're ready. Naturally I chose the easiest and safest option, these babies are precious there was no way I was going to risk death by pipette. If I could have, I would have placed the pot with the open end right next to The Beast, lol. Come and get it guys, dinner is served! However that proved impossible to do so I had to make do with placing the pot on the sand and leaning it against the bottom of the rockwork. I was concerned that the pot would become dislodged overnight by a hermit or snail and end up rolling around the tank in the flow so I had the brainwave to weigh it down with a small rock and I had the perfect rock in mind. It came equipped with at least 3 tiny Aiptasia snacks, so if they felt peckish before moving out they could have one for the road so to speak. Day 1: I rushed down to see if The Beast was gone but darn it! It was still alive and healthy. As far as I could ascertain all the Berghia were still mooching about in the pot. As the lights became brighter the nudibranchs took refuge in small holes in the rock or hid underneath it. OK, out of prying eyes of hungry wrasse at least. Disappointingly the tiny Aiptasia growing on the rock in the pot appeared untouched. To my very great surprise during the course of the day one of the Berghia laid a spiral of eggs on the small rock, I have to say I was pretty chuffed with this, more recruits for my Aiptasia munching army assuming they managed to survive to hatching. Day 2: The Beast still remains untouched. The pot appeared devoid of nudibranchs but they could be out of view in or under the rock. I opted to leave the pot where it was for a little while longer mainly to protect the newly laid eggs. I feared that my hermit crabs might find them an irresistible snack given the chance. By the afternoon however a hermit had managed to find its way into the pot and had no way of escaping. It was unconcernedly picking 'food' off the small rock. This forced me to take action, I removed the pot, liberated the hermit crab and placed the small rock on the sand next to the rockwork. As I was placing the rock I discovered the nudibranchs had laid another two spirals of eggs (on the opposite side of the rock to the first batch). Pretty cool huh! I hope that they don't all get eaten now that they are exposed to fish/crabs etc. Day 3: The Beast is thriving dammit! In fact I don't see that any Aiptasia have been touched even some really tiny ones, that's not to say some haven't, just none that I can tell. There's no sign of any Berghia, hopefully sitting tight, hidden in the rockwork and building up an appetite. The eggs have survived the first night in the tank, maybe they are not very appetising to hermit crabs? Fingers crossed.
That's it for now, I hope and pray that these little nudibranchs do the trick and rid my tank of Aiptasia. Time will tell I guess. If they don't make it then I'll have to move on to plan B.... Just as I managed to organise a replacement heater for the one that failed a few weeks ago (thank you D-D Aquarium Solution for the excellent support) something else has broken in my tank. 😕
I decided that it was about time that I gave the random flow generator a clean, it had built up a layer of coralline algae as all things tend to do in a reef tank with lighting. I assumed this was probably detrimental to the flow rate, I clean my powerheads regularly so why not the RFG? I pulled the unit off the return pipework but before I could even place it in some citric acid a bit fell off. My first thought was that one of the RFG had popped off the Loc Line but no, it had completely broken off along the lower portion. I went ahead and cleaned the unit anyway and then discovered that the other side had split too. Does acrylic become brittle over time in saltwater? Surely a bit of coralline can't be stronger than acrylic?? I didn't drop it or treat it harshly so I'm not quite sure what to make of it to be honest. I purchased a frag of Red Planet Acro (Acropora hyacinthus) in February 2017. Over the last four years it has survived red bugs, plodded along when Utter Chaos zoanthids grew all over its lower half and endured being hacked up and moved to another new tank. However the last 6 months have been its biggest test so far. To recap, I transferred a segment of the coral over to the new tank on the 17th April 2020. Over the following couple of months it lost some colour but, all things considered, it seemed to be doing OK. However 7 weeks after that it had browned out even more. Then, ever so slowly things got even worse. It stopped growing altogether and kind of just hung on looking rather sad. Alkalinity and calcium uptake slowed down so that I kept having to reduce the amount the doser added. My other Acro (A. gomezi) oddly seemed to be OK with the conditions, it had great polyp extension, reasonable colouration and even a little growth. I began working through my list of possible tank issues. Cobalt poisoning? I kept up with the weekly water changes. Chemical warfare from the large gorgonian growing just to the left of it (do gorgonian release toxins in the same way leather corals do? I don't know). I regularly changed the activated carbon just in case. Not enough flow? I tried turning up the pumps but it made no difference (and upset the clam in the process). Not enough nutrients? This was certainly possible, to begin with they were on the low side especially the phosphate level (or so I am led to believe these days). I was dosing both anyway to combat the Amphidinium on the sand. In July the nitrate level hovered at around 1-2ppm and the phosphate bounced somewhere between 0 and 0.021ppm (depending on which days results you chose to look at). By December I'd managed to raise the nitrate to 5ppm and kept it steady at that level. I stopped dosing phosphate when it reached 0.06ppm but even so at the level kept gradually increasing, and as we all know high phosphate is bad for SPS corals so I started running Rowaphos to keep it in check (PO4 level peaked at 0.15 in mid December) *sigh*. I had been feeding a lot of food all through this, Oh and I also tried dosing with Red Sea AB+ for a short while to see if it made any difference. It didn't. By the beginning of December the Red Planet had started to recede at the base and had lost some flesh on the underside of the branches. I didn't take any photos because it looked so awful and I honestly felt sure it was going to completely strip at any minute. I did however, find one photo taken in December where part of it featured quite well. I was trying to photograph the ghost cardinals at the time and totally failing, lol. You can see how brown the Acro looks with almost no polyp extension and some parts underneath where flesh has gone. A sorry sight indeed. Literally the same day as the above photo was taken I noticed a hint of green at the base of the coral. Maybe all was not lost. Fast forward to today, a month later and it's totally transformed. The rate by which the Acro 'greened' up again and regrew the dead areas has been nothing short of miraculous. Polyp extension is back and it's even started to take on a pink tinge again. There's life in this (Red) Planet after all! What caused this minor miracle? Well I can't say for sure. It could be that the TMC rock has finally stopped leeching cobalt, I need to send off another ICP test before I know that. I started adding Korrallen Zucht Sponge Power on 5th December but I can't imagine that helped the Acro at all. On the same day I also added 1.2kg Tropic Marin Reef Mud Vital to the refugium. I had some left over from my previous tank so I thought what have I got to lose? As it happens the refugium started growing Ostropsis dinoflagellates so I have could have lost a lot (including my sanity) but fortunately balance was restored again and the Dinos faded away after a few weeks of giving me sleepless nights. It is entirely plausible that the mud has added some essential nutrients that the tank and Acro had been missing. Something that can not be measured via and ICP perhaps. I can't think of a better explanation right now unless the coral suddenly decided to get busy live rather than get busy dying...
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AuthorHi, my name is Lisa and I live in Derby, UK. I am a self-confessed reefaholic! Archives
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