Aptasia problem Vs. CBS

We have had our coral banded shrimp for 2 years. She has been with us through multiple tank wipe outs, and moved with us from our little hole in the wall apartment to our house into a better tank.

That being said, our tank is only 29 gal, and we have a huge aptasia outbreak this month. H bought Aptasia-X and has been injecting left and right, but wherever we inject, there are 4 more that appear the next day. They are everywhere and stinging our corals and frags.

I know a coral banded won't take kindly to peppermint shrimp additions, and that H is having a hard time with the aptasia but I (being the lady of the house) can almost get to tears when I think about taking her to the LFS.

Tell me what you would do.

 

Aptasia-X dose not work. i had the same thing happen when i used it. get joe's juice. inject them as you did with the other junk. but with joes juice they will not come back!

 

Put an air pump in a bucket with some sand and a little rock. Temporarily keep the coral banded shrimp in there. Buy a bunch of peppermints to clean up your tank. After their job is done, return the peppermints for store credit and move the coral banded shrimp back to the tank.

 

Really? Darn, after some research H was finding reviews on Aptasia-X to be the best. Who has the best price of JJ? *off to google around*

 

Would he peppermint shrimp be hard to catch? We just put down a bunch of new frags, I am just worried that swinging a net around the frags would do some damage. Any trick to catching PS easily?

 

Also, I guess another question would be, which of the two is more beneficial to a reef community, CBS or Peppermint shrimp and why?

 

Coral Banded Shrimp VS Peppermint Shrimp

Which is more beneficial to a reef community, and why?

 

I have the same problem, but I went the Berghia Nudibranch route. They only feed on Aipastia, once the aipastia is gone they die out. The Aipastia is beginning to disappear. It takes months though. I don't know how they would do with your shrimp. The shrimp may like to eat them. I hope this helps a bit. Good luck in getting them under control.

 

Peppermint shrimp are hit or miss. I've only ever had one over the years that ate aiptasia. Wouldn't be worth the trouble to me to move out the CBS and wait for peps to eat all the aiptasia...especially since there's no guarantee they will or how long it will take them if they do.

 

They both clean up extra food, other than that the only benefit of the peps would be if they DO eat aiptasia. It's also possible they might pick at corals later. No other benefit of the CB unless it also doubles as a cleaner of your fish, which doesn't happen much. The CBS will get a lot larger and can possibly become a threat to slow-moving livestock in your tank, including fish.