Whether you have a reef tank or a fish-only tank with live rock, the aiptasia anemone or glass anemone can become a real pest in your saltwater aquarium and can even overrun your tank, killing off corals and covering your live rock.  They can even cause problems with your fish too.  Here are some of the biggest mistakes to avoid and what to do instead.

Mistake #1 – Not Inspecting New Invertebrate Additions For The Presence of Aiptasia Anemones - This is one of the biggest mistakes aquarists often make.  We get excited about adding a new coral, snail, hermit crab, or live rock to our tank and do not take the time to inspect them for the presence of these pesky anemones.

Solution: Inspect any new additions to your tank (especially invertebrates) for the presence of aiptasia anemones.  The best way to do this is to setup a small quarantine tank, in which you can place new additions for to observe them for any nasty hitch hikers such as aiptasia anemones.  It doesn’t take long, perhaps a few hours or a couple of days of observation.  And if you find them there are many ways to remove them.

Mistake #2 – Depending Only On Manual Removal - In the event that you do get one or more of these anemones in your saltwater aquarium, you will want to remove it.  And while there are many products on the market for manual removal of aiptasia, not all of them work.  And even for the ones that do work, manual removal is only part of the total solution.  This is especially true when you consider the fact that aiptasia anemones reproduce asexually by pedal laceration.  This fancy term breaks down to the words “foot tearing”.  As aiptasia anemones crawl along (yes they are motile) they leave behind pieces of their foot, which then grow up into more adults.

Solution: Think prevention and biological control.  This means putting animals in your tank that eat aiptasia anemones.  Examples of such animals include, Copperbanded Butterflyfish, Bristletail Filefish, Berghia nudibranchs, Auriga Butterflyfish, Racoon Butterflyfish (not reef safe).

Mistake #3 – Over Feeding With Baby Brineshrimp And Other Small Suspended Foods – While they are photosynthetic, aiptasia will really begin to reproduce quickly with the presence of suspended food items such as baby brineshrimp or Cyclopeeze, which they can capture with their tentacles with great efficiency.

Solution: Limit the offering of baby brineshrimp and other small suspended particulates and be sure not to over feed.  The less particulate food they catch, the less they reproduce and the easier it is to control them.

Mistake #4 – Removing Live Rock  Pieces and Corals To Kill The Aiptasia Anemones – Often when people go to remove or kill the aiptasia anemones in their tank, they grow on live rock or on the rock base of a coral.  And the mistake made here is removing the rock from its position to kill or treat the aiptase anemone.  The problem with this is that the rock almost never gets put back into the exact same position, and worse it destabilizes the live rock structure.  This destabilization leads to rock slides and collapse of the rock structure, which can kill fish and corals and other invertebrates.  It also shrinks the size of the live rock structure, ultimately turning the live rock structure you took so long to get just right into a pile of rocks.  This takes away hiding places for fish, reduces water circulation through the live rock, which causes it to collect detritus and organic matter, which degrades water quality.

Solution: Leave the rocks and corals in the tank when removing aiptasia anemones – even when killing the aiptasia anemones by hand.  You are better off focusing your removal efforts on using biological controls and let the aiptasia-eating animals in your tank do most of the work.  They are much better at it than we are.

Have you ever made any of these mistakes, or others not listed?  Please leave a comment and tell us what you think.

Technorati Tags: aiptasia, aiptasia anemome, anemone, fish-only tank, prevention, reef tank, saltwater aquarium

As the Curator of the Ocean Explorium (New Bedford, MA), I am responsible for multiple marine aquarium exhibits.  Two weeks ago, I got one of those phone calls no one wants to get.

It was the weekend and I was enjoying my time off.  As I listened to the aquarist describe the problem, her frustration was high.One of our aquarium exhibits was up to almost 90 degrees F!  It was the sea scallop exhibit (normally at 58 degrees F).

The aquarist had just completed a water change AND she did complete the “check out” procedure we always do when leaving for the day.  And then she went home.  But … during the “check out” process, instead of looking at the temperature controller to confirm that the chiller was on, she looked at the power plug (which she had unplugged during the water change).  The only problem was that the plug wasn’t plugged all the way in, thus, the chiller was not on and the tank overheated to 90F (instead of 58F).

Saltwater aquariums, and all aquariums for that matter, are subject to inherent vulnerabilities, which, if not addressed and accounted for, may lead to the demise of your aquarium’s inhabitants.  So what are these inherent vulnerabilities?

Well, before I get into it, let’s just say they are simpler than you may think.  You might be thinking of the 100 things that can go wrong in a saltwater aquarium.  Because, lets’ face it.  Keeping saltwater fish and/or reeftanks involves solving a lot of problems.  After all, there is nothing like a big problem to help you really learn your lesson and improve your skills of problem solving.  At the end of this post, I’ll tell you a brief story of one recent nightmare that was a perfect example of not doing a proper “check out”, and how it would have caught the issue and prevented the loss of animals.

But first, back to the mistake of only focussing on problem solving.  Even if you only focus on becoming great at problem solving, you will waste a lot of time dealing with problems that could have and should have been prevented.  So now you’re thinking you should be focused on the prevention of problems … and you’d be right.

So what is my big secret to how to prevent over 90% of the inherent problems that come with keeping saltwater fish and reef aquariums?

When I tell you my secret solution, you’re going to say to yourself “that’s obvious” or “that’s so simple”.  And again, you’d be right.  So here it is.

My secret to preventing over 90% of all problems that are inherent with saltwater aquarium keeping is … “check in …. and check out”.

See, I told you it was going to sound simple and obvious.  Most problems that occur in keeping saltwater aquariums are preventable … by far.  If you want to see consistent problems, floods, broken equipment and loss of valuable saltwater fish or corals, then watch what happens when you don’t do a proper “check in” and “check out”.

And the key to doing a proper “check in” and “check out” is to turn it into a written recipe or procedure that you go over EVERY SINGLE TIME you work on your tank(s).  The key here is that it be written out as a check list, SO THAT YOU DON’T FORGET ANYTHING.  In fact, because you’ve written it out (post it on the wall in your fish room or on the cabinet door under your tank, etc.), now you no longer have to worry about forgetting any of the key steps in this process.

This whole ‘forgetting things’ is usually the biggest source of nightmares, accidents, leaks/floods, and problems in saltwater aquarium keeping.  In my aquarium consulting business, we service large, high-end saltwater aquariums (typically costing over $50,000), so you can imagine how important it is to prevent problems.  When we come to service a client’s tank, the first thing we do is go through our “check in” process.  We use a simple written check list for this, and you’d be surprised how many items are on the list (it’s over 25).

But the great thing about having this list is that you don’t miss anything, and you don’t have to think.  You just go down the list and check them off.  Save your thinking for problem solving.  Yes … that’s right.  Even after you adopt a strict and consistent routine of doing a thorough “check in” and “check out”, you will still have problems to solve … just A LOT LESS of them … a lot less.  I mean, even in the story I told at the begging of this post, a problem still occurred even though we were using a “check out” procedure … it just wasn’t followed correctly.  This is where the human error part of the equation comes into play.  We humans make mistakes and when we’re in a rush we take short cuts … which is one of the rules of proper “check in” and “check out” – no short cuts.  Always follow the procedure.

So you’re probably wondering if we lost any animals with that big of a temperature spike.  The answer is yes.  We lost four scallops, but it took them a few days until the effects of the temperature spike to do them in.

Stay tuned for more, in upcoming posts, as I’ll go into detail on how to do a proper and thorough “check in” and “check out”, and exactly what to “check” for.  Meanwhile, go to www.saltwateraquariumsecrets.com and sign up so that you don’t miss anything.  Also, you can click on the orange RSS button at the top of this page to be notified whenever we post new material here on the blog.

Go now to www.saltwateraquariumsecrets.com to get more tips and secrets on how to actually enjoy this wonderful hobby.  Look over our shoulder as we take you behind the scenes of public aquariums and custom saltwater aquariums.

Technorati Tags: "check in", "check out", high temperature, overheated tank, prevention, problem solving