3 pests on zoa

[3sxp]

Hi all. I received a zoa frag that has "extras". Two I think are aiptasia polyps and sponge (cloudy white stuff low between polyps); the third I don't know. It looks like thin white stems coming out from between the polyps. They are attached to the body of the zoas and are most visible as thin white stems when the zoa is closed. There are more aiptasia? polyps between the zoas.

Questions:
- am I right about the aiptasia and sponge?
- are the white stems part of the sponge?
- should I manually remove the stems? They are attached and pull a bit of membrane off the zoa when removed.
- this was an online order - is this pest volume something I should discuss with the vendor? The zoa otherwise seems strong and decent size.

 

[Saltyreef]

I would remove it into a small container of tank water and scrape off everything you can before placing in display.

I also wanted to say, really cool avatar photo. I know exactly where that was taken as I have been visiting that aquarium since I was a little boy! Now its the next generations turn!

Cheers and good luck!

 

[vetteguy53081]

Hi all. I received a zoa frag that has "extras". Two I think are aiptasia polyps and sponge (cloudy white stuff low between polyps); the third I don't know. It looks like thin white stems coming out from between the polyps. They are attached to the body of the zoas and are most visible as thin white stems when the zoa is closed. There are more aiptasia? polyps between the zoas.

Questions:
- am I right about the aiptasia and sponge?
- are the white stems part of the sponge?
- should I manually remove the stems? They are attached and pull a bit of membrane off the zoa when removed.
- this was an online order - is this pest volume something I should discuss with the vendor? The zoa otherwise seems strong and decent size.

Tube worms. As mentioned- scrape off and discard. If in between polyps, you can break at base with tweezers

 

[3sxp]

I would remove it into a small container of tank water and scrape off everything you can before placing in display.

I also wanted to say, really cool avatar photo. I know exactly where that was taken as I have been visiting that aquarium since I was a little boy! Now its the next generations turn!

Cheers and good luck!

Thank you. Yeah, I went to my LFS yesterday to get advice and he said to keep it in quarantine for a couple of weeks and scrape off everything manually. I just wanted to make sure those white stalks aren't part of the zoa before I did!

I scraped off a bunch yesterday, will work on more today. Might be coincidence, but there's a GSP in the QT tank a few inches away from this one, and after I did that, it is closed up today instead of opening (just a couple of polyps open as opposed to yesterday and even this morning when almost all of them were). Wondering if it's responding to something the zoa is releasing. They're all in a pretty small water volume (about 5g in a 15g tank) -- I'll take out more DT water and do a water change...

And thank you! That's my 6yo son. I don't normally have pics of him on the internet but this is pretty unidentifiable and is one of my favorites. My husband and I actually got married there before they stopped doing weddings. Had opening reception in that hall.

 

[3sxp]

Tube worms. As mentioned- scrape off and discard. If in between polyps, you can break at base with tweezers

Thank you, super helpful. I've been pulling a few with tweezers but was worried I was hurting it.

 

[3sxp]

Just updating this thread because if I can't talk to someone about this I'll go crazy, and my friends are getting bored.

So it's been three weeks and I continue to pull all kinds of gunk off of this frag. I've removed several more worms (a couple I ID'd as bristleworms and tossed into my display tank), more sponge -- and I've scraped several times at the aiptasia. I was doing this maybe once or twice a week and was worried I was stressing the frag -- and my QT tank is crappy (aren't most QT tanks crappy?) so I've been feeling bad about the zoa being in there.

But yesterday I checked on it and despite my just having cleaned it a couple of days prior, there were two giant aiptasia still on it. Actually, now that I look at this photo, I can see at least three.

So I decided to go at it hardcore with the glue. I basically painted the entire outside of the frag with reef glue. This got one of them (again on inspection of the photos maybe two), but although I tried to squish glue in between the two polyps where the other one was hiding, I obviously missed because here it is this morning, as big and obnoxious as ever. The polyp it's next to actually was open earlier, so I think when the aiptasia opened up it closed up in response. I don't THINK I killed any of the polyps with glue, so there's that at least.

There's so much glue it looks like it's sitting in fake snow.

I was placing an order with reefcleaners.org so I went ahead and added a peppermint shrimp to it anyway, and it arrives today. I'm going to release it into the QT and hope for the best. Concerned about the water quality in there but I did like a 90% water change on it yesterday to try to clear out what was there.

I will say I'm grateful that:
1) I didn't just huck this in my display tank. I originally wasn't even going to run a QT, but decided to set one up for what I thought would be a day or two of observation and rest before a dip.
2) I now have a very visceral appreciation for how much of a pain aiptasia are. Can't imagine trying to eradicate them from a big tank.
3) this zoa ("utter chaos", z. gigantus) is tough as hell. The two other zoas I have are tinier and I don't think would have fared as well. (But they also didn't come covered with pests. )

Have I done the right thing here? Every week for the past three weeks I've thought I'd find it clean and ready to switch over, but then these guys were back. I'm pretty sure at this point that I'm not good enough with manual removal to get this one -- I tried to scrape heavily again before putting the glue on yesterday. And I don't want to risk shoving more glue between those polyps -- WDYT?

Hopefully the peppermint shrimp goes straight after it and that's the end of the story.