Experience with peppermint shrimp for aiptasia?

[jcolliii]

Peppermints look a lot like camels, so make sure you know what you're getting. Camels are cute, but they'll pull food right out of coral mouths...

 

[Whirly]

While not peppermint shrimp... I have heard that if you turn off the flow in the tank, and directly apply kalkwasser to the aiptasia...it will kill it like the plague. Use only a small amount of course. And keep it away from your corals.
I have not tried this myself, only read others experiences.
This is however only a short term solution. If you have an aiptasia problem, I would look into a active CBB, file fish, or other solutions.
My cbb ate the only piece of aiptasia in my whole tank...so now the only thing im dealing with is a minor bit of hair algae in my frag tank...and white dot on the back glass in my DT

 

[Slawman]

They didn't work for me, they are cool but you never really see them after you put them in the tank...

 

[Wee Mad Arthur]

I bought from a shop guaranteeing that they were the aiptasia eating species and my 2 are doing a fantastic job. They’re not a bad looking shrimp either, they have fluorescent dots on their back.

 

[lilgrounchuck]

Are they compatible with cleaner shrimp?

Mine don’t bother each other at all.

 

[piranhaman00]

Mine only ate acans. And it was wicked fast, overnight I had three acans completley down to skeleton.

 

[siggy]

I had a couple in my old tank, aiptasia disappeared and so did my zoas, acans, lobos and trachy. When the food runs out they will find more. BTW I was starving the tank to reduce po4, I caught some larger crabs picking on the corals also.
live and learn

 

[Indytraveler83]

I've got 3 peppermints that keep my aiptasia in check pretty well, I've never seen one sprout up and survive the night.

I've also never seen them mess with healthy coral. When my heater failed off and my acro frags started dying, they feasted.

Now anemones are a different story. They will try to pull food from my nems, and I had them kill a small bta. I've always gotta buy nems big enough that they can defend themselves.

 

[TerraFerma]

You are buying them to eat an anemone. Don’t be shocked when they start eating other things if they don’t find enough food.

 

[CindyKz]

They have worked for me, and I've never caught them eating any type of coral. I keep my tanks well fed.

 

[Ckane2]

Seems like a common theme among answers is keeping them well fed will lower the chances of them eating corals ;Bookworm

 

[Daniel@R2R Verified Admin]

Seems like a common theme among answers is keeping them well fed will lower the chances of them eating corals ;Bookworm

Yep

 

[denst1]

Just added two peppermint shrimp to my 75 gallon tank about a week ago bought from reefcleaners.org. Super surprised to wake up next morning and the 3 small aiptasa I had were gone. The aiptasa were also in three completely different areas of the tank

 

[acesfull44]

I had a pretty good sized outbreak of aiptasia about 2 months ago. A close friend (who owns LFS) talked me into adding a file fish that had been in 3 other customer tanks. I understood the risk, and while he ate a few aiptasia, he also manged to eat some LPS, so I removed him immediately. I replaced him with 10 peppermint shrimp that he got in the following week, and although my mellanarus wrasse ate 3 or 4 of them, the rest were miracle workers and literally within a week mine were all gone. I still have a few in my overflow, but I literally could not believe how effective they were. Everyone has different experiences which work for some and not for others (which is why I tried the file fish) but ultimately found great success with the peppermints I added. Good Luck!

 

[vetteguy53081]

Best aptasia solution is a kleini butterfly. Pretty fish and good around coral. Eats all foods and aptasia like candy

 

[stevieduk]

i always use aiptasia X. always works and you can watch them implode

 

[CoralVue_Marketing]

I've had success with peppermint shrimp taking care of my aiptasia problems. They came from Quality Marine.

 

[Glott3133]

They can work but will not eat the large ones. My peppermints eat Ricordea like its candy.

When you say they won't eat the large ones. How large is too large for them?

 

[Glott3133]

I bought a peppermint shrimp from my LFS a few months ago for this exact purpose. The very first thing he did when I put him in was find a hole to hide in. The very next thing he did was make a snack of the tips of my green torch polyps. The next morning I saw this.

Like you, I have a blue throat trigger. I can just see it being a snack for him.

 

[lapin]

When you say they won't eat the large ones. How large is too large for them?

Lets say bigger round than a nickel and tentacles longer than 1/2 inch