all out war on aefw, opinions on plan

[toothman]

First off i'm really bummed to see you fall victim to AEFW, your beautiful and mature acros are amazing mate.
Why do you say it won't be a popular suggestion about the over skimming. If you run your water very rich in suspended food which is generated by the occupants of the tank then skimming can and will strip your water of coral food imo if you do it too aggressively. I used to run my beckett skimmer as dry as possible because it stripped the water clean if i ran it too wet. The needle wheel types we all use now are much less brutal in how they go about accomplishing the same thing i find and much easier to fine tune. Have you tried running your skimmer a lot drier than you normally do for a few weeks, might reduce so much water borne 'stuff' being collected as quickly. If i have a crystal clear view through 40" of water in my tank i'm not happy.
Sorry if i misunderstood what you meant by the comment and i just realised how off topic this is as well

I do look through the 7' of water to judge how clean the water is. I also have been turning the skimmer on and off to try to evaluate if the skimmer is oversized etc. My finding is that turning skimmer off for 12 hrs a day, on timer, dramatically increaces pe on acros. I also found that this method does not produce less skimmate than running 24/7. As a matter of fact with in 1 hr. of skimmer off the acros show much greater pe. The skimmer seems to catch up and collect as much as all day skimming. I do skim somewhat wet, approx. 1/2 of coffee water daily. I began this cycle on/off because there was a problem. Thinking that my acros are larger now and need more nutrients for the whole tank. Since I began this cycle the tank has done better.

I am so convinced that my skimmer, the way it runs now is detrimental, that I am strongly considering changing skimmers. Possibly to a revolution m skimmer, buying into the whole palnkton friendly thing. There are several reefers on zeovit that sware after changing from large needle wheel to beckett skimmer that their tank did much better. Some even say you can not run zeovit with needle wheel skimmer.

So instead of spending $1,500 on a new skimmer on your suggestion I will drop the level on the skimer to skim super dry.

So possibly too low nutrients plus some aefw is a deadly combination.

 

[toothman]

Ditto ^^^

Been here before. Personally I'd frag every piece and put frags into a different system to start over. Then just try to manage the main display rather than upsetting everything in it. I lost a looong battle. Watched as many huge colonies were dessimated by these things. Honestly I'm not convinced its possible to rid your system of these once you have them unless of course you start over and QT at nauseum. IMHO prepare yourself to lose all those beautiful colonies, baste them daily. Add natural predators like coris wrasse and cross your fingers. And if your able to save some of them count your blessings. This suks man. Sad to see this. Good luck with what ever you try. Hope it works for you.

you are right but I do not want your info to be correct. I am somewhat in denial, thinking it may just go away. I keep going out to my tank and say well it does not look that bad.

 

[toothman]

Hence the need for a separate qt tank for these little shrimp.

To be certain of getting the correct species, you might want to order from live aquaria.com if you reside in the US.

I noticed that live aquaria promotes it as an aefw predator.

They seem to be readily available from live aquaria, If I do qurantine the coral like I stated above I will certainly get some camel shrimp. For now I decided to just live with aefw and hope for the best. So much for all out war.

 

[galleon]

Living with them means basting them off the coral and letting fish eat them out of the water column - have you been doing that?

Moving those big colonies will most likely result in their death.

+1 Moving those big established colonies is a bad bad idea. Some of the most talented, skilled and experienced sps aquarists in the world have knocked off many amazing tank-grown out corals doing exactly this.

 

[Oldude]

I feel your pain so here is my opinion

I feel your pain so here is my opinion

Been there - done that & I disagree that you can live with AEFW or monti eating nudis as a sustainable plan long term or contain the problem with fish in a system your size with corals that big. (I have had both) I would cut insurance frags of everything possible and do the 6 week dipping schedule. It is a huge undertaking & can be very hard on some corals so what I recommend is making the dip solution double strength and dip for a shorter time using a baster to blow the AEFW off in the dip. ( I used Coral RX) Inspect each piece as you take it out of the tank for eggs and casings, manually scrape them off & inspect again after you do the rinse before they go back in the tank. You may need to cut whole chunks of coral off to get at them so be prepared to get aggresive as it is better than loosing the whole colony. AEFW multiply at an incrdible rate so you need to stay on top of it once you start. Also at the tail end of the dipping schedule once you are no longer seeing worms coming off when you dip, do it once more the next week as there could be some on rock somewhere in the tank moving from one coral to another - they seem to have favorites they will target first. Once you are done all that be prepared over the next several weeks to pull out pieces at random or that look iffy and dip to confirm the problem has been resolved.
This is what I did to get rid of mine & yes I lost some corals but I saved way more than I lost and if you have clean insurance frags you can get those lost pieces back.

 

[Oldude]

They seem to be readily available from live aquaria, If I do qurantine the coral like I stated above I will certainly get some camel shrimp. For now I decided to just live with aefw and hope for the best. So much for all out war.

I have heard that camel shrimp will eat them and if you keep a wack of them in a QT tank they can make short work of the cleaning but once they are gone they will damage the coral. I have heard the same about peppermint shrimp as well but you need a lot of them and it only works keeping them in a separate tank.

 

[toothman]

Been there - done that & I disagree that you can live with AEFW or monti eating nudis as a sustainable plan long term or contain the problem with fish in a system your size with corals that big. (I have had both) I would cut insurance frags of everything possible and do the 6 week dipping schedule. It is a huge undertaking & can be very hard on some corals so what I recommend is making the dip solution double strength and dip for a shorter time using a baster to blow the AEFW off in the dip. ( I used Coral RX) Inspect each piece as you take it out of the tank for eggs and casings, manually scrape them off & inspect again after you do the rinse before they go back in the tank. You may need to cut whole chunks of coral off to get at them so be prepared to get aggresive as it is better than loosing the whole colony. AEFW multiply at an incrdible rate so you need to stay on top of it once you start. Also at the tail end of the dipping schedule once you are no longer seeing worms coming off when you dip, do it once more the next week as there could be some on rock somewhere in the tank moving from one coral to another - they seem to have favorites they will target first. Once you are done all that be prepared over the next several weeks to pull out pieces at random or that look iffy and dip to confirm the problem has been resolved.
This is what I did to get rid of mine & yes I lost some corals but I saved way more than I lost and if you have clean insurance frags you can get those lost pieces back.

I believe you. I am going to be forced to go down that path. Just dipped most of the corals and put them back in the tank. For sure they like A. valida, just threw them out, only really saw visible aefw on the valdia. I used bayer, I did a experement with coral rx, it seems to cause the aefw to release from the coral but I kept the aefw in the dip over night and they were still kicking. When I did it with bayer it caused them to curl up almost immediately and die. Also tried a fresh water dip on A. valdia with eggs, there was a suggestion that fresh water will make eggs release. Overnight the eggs were still the coral. So fresh water has no effect.

Always did dip my acros prior to introduction, BUT: LESSON LEARNED DIP AND ISOLATE PRIOR TO INTRODUCTION.