Whats the answer to this pest...

[Ben1]

Zoa eatting nudis in my sons tank. He has zoas on almost all of his rocks....but they havent been opening in several weeks to Ive been checking and finding these....

 

[Len]

Eek. I don't think there's anything known to eat them. People just do a long FW dip, often with lugol's, and they repeat until the nudis are gone. It's the eggs that are the real PITA.

 

[Ben1]

Great...he has a nice colelctions of zoas too but they are all on rocks that have SPS encrusted also so if I FW dip I would lose the SPS. If I dont I lose the zoas....this stinks.

 

[Ben1]

I have a quarantine tank to use so guess I will take all his rocks that have zoas on them out and chip the zoas off the rocks and FW dip them then move them all the the QT. I am so carful with everything going in my tanks, I did everything. Guess I wasnt careful enough becuase I have these in my sons tank and have redbugs in my SPS tank....

 

[Anonymous]

Remove the nudibranches manually you'll find them congregated at the top of the tank shortly after lights on, and scrape the eggs off the rocks' it's not that hard to do. You may have to repeat a few times.

Regards,
David Mohr

 

[Ben1]

Ok I'll tray that first David. I saw a bigger one this morning above the green zoas that was green, I assume from eatting the green zoa. All the palys (purple deaths, nuclear green, AoG, Pink elephant ears, and some unknowns for you name people) are open. Just the zoas are closed so I guess my question is do they eat both zoas and palys or just zoas?

 

[Ben1]

I noticed all the zoas are closed and tha palys werent. My lFS guy told me they dont eat palys. For the last few days one of the palys started closing up and I noticed some nudis on it so I plucked it out to the QT and noticed it also had some egg strings on it. So do they eat both palys and zoas, and if so do they eat other softies?

 

[Ben1]

FWIW they are laying eggs on the sides of the zoas/palys not on the rock, so they are hard to spot or get to. Now that they are all in QT I should be able to take care of this.

 

[kgross]

You have a pretty big problem there. It is very difficult to remove nudi's from a stocked tank. One of the best things you can do since you can't do the long FW dips, is add something like christmas wrasse or a coris wrasse. Many of them will eat the nudi's, which will not exterminate them, but it can keep the numbers so low that you will not have a problem.

Kim