So far.
I removed all live rock and sand.
got 360lbs of new shugar sand.
I put all my live rock in fresh water for like 3 weeks.
It is entirely dead now.
(I feel kinda bad about the critters)
Now i have a bunch of dead rock without aptasia.
Fish, shrimp, nudibranches and other ideas are just topical treatments. The aptasia will all ways be in your tank somewhere.
I'm convinced the only true way to get rid of it is to do what I did.
Start from an absolute clean slate with no possibility of aptasia introduced into the tank.
THEN, quarantine any live rock/coarls for like a month in a separate tank/container.
That will give the aptasia time to grow large enough to see (if they're there) and give you the chance to remove them from the rock before they enter the main tank.
Side note:
I had some aptasia in my Quarantine tank for fish.
I put a small dose of copper in there (you have to do that before you bring copper up to effective levels for your fish)
The next morning, the aptasia was gone.
It hadn't just fallen off the rock, it had absolutely vaporized.
I suppose you could do this to your live rock in another container outside the main tank, but you run the chance of killing all the little critters inside the rock.
I have a theory:
If you put live rock in another container with copper just long enough for the aptasia to die, then the critters inside the rock won't get much if any copper to hurt them.
Remember.. just a small dose. (I had 1 dose, 5ml of curpamine in my 55gal Quarantine tank)
You'd probably have to rinse it off with fresh water afterward, then you can put it in another container of regular salt water for a good while to see if any of the aptasia come back.
I don't think they will.
(Just a theory though
)
