KimP

Finally had a chance to do some more reading tonight. Turns out the egg containers do much better with no aeration. Not sure how I feel about that, but pulled the airline tonight anyway. Also learned that giving the aiptasia a nice long dark period is a way to get them to bud off and make lots and lots of tiny aiptasias, which is a better size for the juveniles I'm trying to raise. Sounds good to me. Thanks to Timfish, who has access to dozens and dozens of tanks, I got my hand on an aiptasia covered rock, so I'm happy to leave it in a dark bucket for a while. I'll be feeding the aiptasia and putting an airline on it though. I'm not quite ready to set up an aiptasia tank yet, ha! Not sure if I mentioned it before, but I'm using water from my DT for all the water changes. So far all 8 adults are doing well and still gettin' busy laying lots of new egg swirls everyday!

I don't think you have to worry about either of those. Just prune out any pieces that look white, clear, or otherwise dead. Dragon's breath is sure beautiful!

I have a mixed reef with cheato in the sump. I don't really know if it helps nitrates all that much but it is home to a million micro brittle stars, pods, and little feather dusters. It's absolutely stuffed full of them. I like the diversity adds to the system. You can do whatever with the lights down there. Lots of people like to run a reverse light cycle on the sump, basically have the lights on down there all night, then dark when the display lights are on. It can help keep the pH up during the night. There are other kinds of macroalgae you can grow too, not just cheato. You can grow kinds that tangs and other herbivores like to eat and feed it to them. Nothing really eats cheato, but cheato won't go sexual on you. That's where the algae goes white and all goopy and clouds up your system and can drop the oxygen levels.

Welcome to the club!

Thanks! I'm happy to see any progress.

Neat pic I got tonight. Nothing new really today, just added a bunch more aiptasia and collected a bunch of egg swirls. Soon I need to get a little of the water from the bottom of the egg container under a magnifying glass/microscope and see if anything's hatched yet.

I dipped the acans I could easily remove in an iodine based dip a couple days ago. They look moderately better. They went from skeletons with a thin flat layer of tissue on them to having a little puffiness. I'll take it! Today I pulled the rest out and dipped them. It was clear that only the ones dipped showed improvement, so I'm certain it was because of the dip. I hope they all recover, or at least most of them. Not dipped Dipped

Ha! That's a nice looking tank though!

[emoji14]

Welcome to the club! I'd be interested to hear about your pico and nano experiences. I've always enjoyed that size tank.

This morning when I turned the light on there was a berghia getting rather close to the one aiptasia left in their tank. I stopped to watch for a bit and I'm glad I did. It was so interesting! So the aiptasia was close to the edge of the tank, and the berghia was trying to get past it. One of the tentacles from the aiptasia reached out and touched the berghia and they both jumped back. Almost instantly a group of 3 berghia that were all having fun in a pile, about 3 inches to the left of the aiptasia, all stopped and turned the same direction and headed strait for the aiptasia. The aiptasia reached out and touched the berghia a couple more times and each time they both jumped back. I thought there was a chance the aiptasia would grab the berghia to eat it. That's what it looked like was going to happen. Next thing I know, every single berghia is headed towards that aiptasia and they ate it all in just a couple minutes! It was so interesting. That first one must've gotten a sting and sent out some signal to the rest of the gang that it found food. I wish I would've had my phone handy to video the whole thing. I eventually got these pics at least. Going... Going... Gone!

Thanks for sharing your experience. So what did you do with the adults in the end? Would you suggest keeping the eggs, juveniles, and adults separate? Did you separate eggs from the adults at all? How long do you think it took to see any juveniles? How did you handle water changes when the eggs started hatching?I'll see how long I can manage to put only aiptasia in and no rock. I've been planning out an aiptasia tank, so that should make it easy to cut out just the aiptasia and not have any pods get into the berghia tanks.

FluxCapacitor had a weirded out moment when I told him those crazy long arms in my tank were from a 10yr+ brittle star! I swear there have been about 100 times when I thought that thing was dead because it hadn't moved in weeks. Lived in the same 6" for years at a time. Every now and then goes on walkabout and then that's it for a while - back to the same 6". This has been my experience with them too.

Thanks everyone! Hopefully this will work out!

So far I've been pulling out the little, easy to remove things from my tank, like a barnacle and various frag plugs with aiptasia on them. Then I use a razor blade to scrape them off or bone cutters if I need to cut them out, then rinse it off and drop it in. I don't know much about aiptasia yet, and if there are different kinds. I have a couple huuuuge ones and am going to put one in and see what happens. I don't have a solid plan yet for when the easy to remove ones are gone from my DT. I don't have much rock that's easily removed that doesn't have coral on it. I was thinking last night that I should probably set up an aiptasia tank (seperate from my DT, ha!). I'm assuming I won't get any aiptasia to grow in it though! They probably only grow where you don't want them. I'm thinking if it really takes 3 months to get babies, that it'll be the holiday season before I have any big enough to use.

Not rare but decorator crabs are fun, until they decide they have expensive taste and start using your most expensive corals as a hat! I always like to have a brittle starfish. They're just cool overall, but also make a great conversation piece. It creeps out most of the people that come over and notice the tank, lol! I've had basket starfish as hitchhikers before and they were really neat.

Some pictures from this morning. Still have 8 adults. There are 3 new egg swirls

I'm sad to read this. I hope you're not out too long!

If anyone has experience with this I'd appreciate any advice! Also some brainstorming ideas from anyone would be very welcome too. I don't really know what I'm doing [emoji14]

I'm down one adult today, and when they arrived there was only 9 in the container, so I currently have 8 adults. Pics from today: There are about 10 egg swirls in here now,

Pictures from yesterday: FTS Egg container Eggs! Eating aiptasia. They don't waste any time and can mow a pretty big one down in no time! Pretty satisfying to watch With the light off. I'll have to take pictures like this from now on. Didn't realize how blue they'd be!

Sort of. It's increased slowly over time. Last time I had an aiptasia eating filefish and tried berghia, it wiped them all out. Then the filefish died unfortunately and eventually I saw aiptasia again. It's really hard for me to find time to be up on a ladder digging around in the tank, because of the 2 youngest boys I have underfoot. So this type of maintenance is really hard for me at this point in my life! I've also looked into getting one of those lasers, but I have too many aiptasia at this point for that. So that's an approach I'd like to try once I get the numbers down to a manageable level.

Here's my attempt at breeding berghia nudibranchs. Pulled out the ol 3g micro-reefs tank. Small enough so they can all find each other (they're colonial) and find the aiptasia, but hopefully big enough to control temp and salinity swings. Plus I still have all the equipment for it. I ordered 10 of the berghia last week and at the last moment decided to try to breed them instead of putting them in my tank. I really needed 15 minimum for my tank but at $13+ per berghia, plus $50 shipping, I just couldn't stomach buying as much as I'd need. I read everything I could find about breeding these guys and there are so many different ways people have tried, so I took all that info and came up with this, so far. If I have any success at all, I'm sure things will change along the way. The goal is to increase my numbers to at least 15, so I can hit my tank with all of them at once. Supposidely pods eat the berghia eggs and the bigger ones apparently can even eat the adults. Not sure if all that's true, because how do they reproduce in tanks, but I'm planning on putting only aiptasia in the tank and try not to put any rocks in there. Although getting my hands on bare aiptasia isn't the easiest thing. Another idea is to use something to kill the pods on some aiptasia infested rock, like in a bucket not my DT, then put it in with the berghia. If I can rinse it well enough. The problem I see with having rocks in the tank is not being able to keep track of the adults or where all the eggs are. I like to keep track of the adults so I can pull any out that die right away to maintain water quality. What I had going starting out: The idea is to have the adults in the 3g, and move the egg swirls into the container on the right. My thinking is this way I'll be able to do water changes on the 3g without sucking out the babies. Seems like the babies are super tiny and take a bit to settle out and start feeding. I have a microscope and a couple good loupe magnifying glasses so I'm thinking I'll watch the eggs and when I think some may have hatched, start checking the water for babies. I don't have a plan yet for water changes on the baby set up, or what I'll do after they hatch, but I'll come up with something. It can take 3 or more months for the larvae to settle out (!!!) according to this Advanced Aquatics article http://www.advancedaquarist.com/2008/11/breeder More pics from this weekend:

Yes. I have thousands They're just recently starting to bother a coral or two, luckily. I've had an aiptasia eating filefish in there for a while. This is another angle I wanted try.

Thanks for saying that! I'm trying to keep in mind how much better everything else is looking because I'm pretty discouraged about the acans.