(upbeat music)
- One thing you'll find in your reef tank eventually
is a little pest anemone.
Aiptasia, majano, any way you slice it,
they're bad news.
Hi guys and girls, I'm ReefMan
and today it's all about pest anemones in your tank.
The reason these anemones are such bad news
is simply that they'll sting the animals
that you really actually want in your tank
and they reproduce so quickly
and they'll fill every spot that you'd rather
have some coral on.
These anemones range in size
from just a tiny little thing in your rock
to a couple inches, given time to grow.
And they do grow quickly in the right conditions.
You can see one here in the back corner of my tank
where I couldn't see it growing
and I'm pretty sure this is some variety of aiptasia
and it's actually a couple inches across now
when it's fully inflated.
It's time to get rid of it.
Identification of majano versus aiptasia
is really pretty easy.
If the tips of the tentacles are hammer or bubble shaped,
it's probably a majano.
Majano also tend to be more colorful,
sometimes greens and blues.
Really, it's a pity that they're so aggressive
because they don't look entirely bad in the tank.
Clownfish will even host in larger majanos,
but then again, clownfish will host in just about anything,
given the chance.
Mine like the corner of my tank.
How do these get into our tank in the first place?
They hitchhike on rock or coral and frag plugs that you add.
They're masters of disappearing
into deep nooks and crannies in rock
that you might be adding when you just start your tank.
And a tiny part of one will go unnoticed
on the bottom of a frag plug.
So the trick to getting rid of these pests,
before they spread further in your tank
and just become a plague.
You know what you're looking at now
when you see a little anemone growing in your tank
and you know how it probably got in there.
The little brown flower looking thing
is probably an aiptasia or majano anemone.
How do we get rid of it?
There are a few options that we can use.
Number one, just scrub it off.
This is not a great idea on its own.
These anemones are able to reproduce sexually
or asexually by division
and so if you just pull them off the rock
and scrub 'em with a toothbrush or something,
you're really just gonna break up one
into a hundred new anemones that'll all regrow.
So if you go this route, consider combining it
with option two.
So number two.
An extension of number one, scrub it off
but then treat the area.
This can be as simple as just
coating the area, after you scrub it off,
with kalkwasser, and this variation works
but it's not a totally sure thing.
You want to remove the rock from your tank,
scrub off the anemone as best you can
and then cover the whole area with superglue
or kalkwasser or something like that.
And the idea is that you'll prevent
the remaining bits of anemone from regrowing
and this'll work really well,
assuming that you've covered all of the remaining bits.
So number three, chemical warfare.
For this treatment, you will need a syringe
and you can go to the local drug store
and buy a whole box of insulin syringes,
or you can go to your vet and get syringes
from them as well.
This is a 3 milliliter, 22 gauge.
The idea is that you're going to inject
a fatal dose of something that won't hurt your tank
but will kill the anemone.
Something like a kalkwasser slurry.
Mix up a box of this.
Or you could use hydrogen peroxide,
you get it from your drugstore.
Even lemon juice will work for this.
The most common way to do it
is to mix up a slurry of kalkwasser into a thick liquid.
Now, if you're using a tiny syringe
like one of these insulin needles,
you have to make it thinner
or maybe go the hydrogen peroxide route
so you can actually get it into the needle.
With a bigger needle, it's not so hard.
The trick with this option is that it really only
works well if you get the needle
into the anemone to inject it.
If you miss, which is really easy to do,
you risk not killing the entire anemone.
Also a little kalkwasser or hydrogen peroxide will be fine,
your tank won't notice it.
But a lot will definitely change the water chemistry.
I also want to mention Red Sea's Aiptasia X
or Joe's Juice here.
I've seen a lot of people saying it works great,
so I looked up the material data safety sheet
with the MSDS to see what's actually in it.
And we'll scroll down past all the warnings
and you can see that it's mostly calcium chloride
with a little bit of hydrogen peroxide in it.
So you could certainly make this combination
at home yourself, though it's probably easier and cheaper
just to buy Aiptasia X unless you have thousands
of these things to kill.
Note though, if you are killing thousands,
no matter what you're doing,
it's going to mess with your water chemistry
and Aiptasia X will as well, it'll raise your calcium.
And it does have some hydrogen peroxide
so it's not gonna be completely reef safe
if the anemones are amongst the zoanthids
or some other coral.
There is another way, number four.
You could use biological warfare.
The last option that you have for controlling these anemones
is just to find something that will actually eat them.
There are various hermit crabs and shrimp,
particularly the peppermint shrimp, one species of it,
and some fish like the copperband butterfly fish
or the nicely named aiptasia eating filefish.
These fish will eat the anemones.
You can also use a thing called a berghia nudibranch.
And although they will starve if you run out
of anemones so what a lot of people do
is they'll pass these nudibranches
around their reef community so they don't starve to death.
All of these biological controls are going to work best
when you combine them with manual removal.
Sometimes a fish won't eat a healthy, big anemone
but they will eat the remains of one
that you've scrubbed off.
In most cases, biological controls are best,
when they work.
They're best when they work,
but with the exception of the berghia nudibranches,
they are not gonna be a sure thing.
So there is another option, option number five,
the other methods that people try.
Some people use things like lasers or electricity
to burn and shock anemones in their tank.
I really don't think this is worth the risk
for most people out there.
Strong lasers that are strong enough
to burn an anemone is definitely strong enough
to blind you, your fish, other pets
and they're gonna reflect all over the room
while you're trying to get the anemone.
And as far as electricity goes,
don't we use grounding probes to prevent electricity
in our tank?
I'm not sure I'd even want to think about
shocking something in my tank,
and it's not always possible to remove rock
from the aquarium to get an anemone on its own.
So I would steer clear of these methods
unless you're really confident in what you're doing.
So that's it, four good options
and a questionable fifth option
for controlling pest anemones in your reef tank.
I wish you all the success in fighting these things.
Remember that they're not really that bad
if you catch them early.
Don't go overboard and make the problem worse
than it is by trying to treat it in some crazy way.
So thanks for watching, don't forget to subscribe
for more reef content.
Thanks, I will see you next time.
Bye.