For those of you that followed my earlier thread regarding the zoa eating nudibranchs, I thought I'd do a follow up.
After putting my entire zoa population in a quarantine tank, and adding a little Bayer every day for a couple of weeks to kill the little... ummm... you get the idea. Anyway, I put the carbon filter back on and let them sit a couple more days, then rinsed them in RODI and put them in my tank.
Guess what I noticed the other day.
Yeah. Closed up zoas and 2 furry little evil creatures.
So I decided that I need to do one of 3 things:
1- Give up hope on keeping anything oceanic alive, and tear down my tank completely.
2- Throw out all of my zoas. Possibly all of my corals entirely, and go the FOWLR route. (Shark tank, perhaps?)
3- Try the new bottle of RPS All Out that I just got.
So, back up went my little coral QT tank, and the dipping began. I measured carefully and followed the dosing directions in a small bucket of tank water. I love the smell of tea tree oil, which is good, because this stuff is definitely loaded with it. Frags went in the little bucket of blue water first. Then they got rinsed in RODI before going back into the coral QT. After that, a couple of colonies at a time. I did leave the colonies in the dip longer than the prescribed 15 minutes, because they were bigger and more convoluted. Then RODI dip and back into the QT.
I found 12 dead nudibranchs in the little bucket.
I didn't take the time to wait for the water to get warm and toasty for the corals, but they're already starting to open up again, some of them.
I will leave them in there for a couple of weeks to make sure it kills the eggs. If more appear in the next couple of weeks, I may revisit options 1 and 2. The last few days of the QT I'll use some carbon to make sure the blue juice is totally gone so I don't lose Mario Andretti (my cleaner shrimp).
I will keep updating this thread as the situation progresses.
After putting my entire zoa population in a quarantine tank, and adding a little Bayer every day for a couple of weeks to kill the little... ummm... you get the idea. Anyway, I put the carbon filter back on and let them sit a couple more days, then rinsed them in RODI and put them in my tank.
Guess what I noticed the other day.
Yeah. Closed up zoas and 2 furry little evil creatures.
So I decided that I need to do one of 3 things:
1- Give up hope on keeping anything oceanic alive, and tear down my tank completely.
2- Throw out all of my zoas. Possibly all of my corals entirely, and go the FOWLR route. (Shark tank, perhaps?)
3- Try the new bottle of RPS All Out that I just got.
So, back up went my little coral QT tank, and the dipping began. I measured carefully and followed the dosing directions in a small bucket of tank water. I love the smell of tea tree oil, which is good, because this stuff is definitely loaded with it. Frags went in the little bucket of blue water first. Then they got rinsed in RODI before going back into the coral QT. After that, a couple of colonies at a time. I did leave the colonies in the dip longer than the prescribed 15 minutes, because they were bigger and more convoluted. Then RODI dip and back into the QT.
I found 12 dead nudibranchs in the little bucket.
I didn't take the time to wait for the water to get warm and toasty for the corals, but they're already starting to open up again, some of them.
I will leave them in there for a couple of weeks to make sure it kills the eggs. If more appear in the next couple of weeks, I may revisit options 1 and 2. The last few days of the QT I'll use some carbon to make sure the blue juice is totally gone so I don't lose Mario Andretti (my cleaner shrimp).
I will keep updating this thread as the situation progresses.
