HELP! Nudibrachs are eating my zoas!

[lawless]

I have a 34g Red sea max and noticed a small nudibranch a few weeks ago. I didn't think much off it. Well now there are a bunch and I think they are eating all my zoas. I saw a few on them tonight. I can not take everything out to dip so would need to dose something. I have read about some things I can put in but not sure what would be best. Any one have experience or recommendations? I appreciate any help you can give.

 

[betamed]

34g? I would take out the zoas and dip them and scrub off eggs. yellow coris wrasse would be my first choice for a fish to eat them.

 

[sjfishguy]

I got a sixline wrasse and he got rid of them. They are a 50/50 shot from what I hear though.

 

[ggrillo]

Look into dosing flatworm exit on the entire tank. I just recently did it after loosing a bunch of corals and all the remaining ones made it through no problem.

 

[lawless]

I have a sixline in there now. I will try the flatworm exit.....that was one I read about that had decent success.

 

[lawless]

I dosed the Flatworm Exit and immediately started to see the Nudibranchs swell up. I syphoned out the ones I could and let it do its work. I pulled a few of them out from the zoa colonies. By day 2 I immediately saw the zoas start to open up. I am going to do another dose the middle of this week in case any new ones hatch but I must say I see some improvement already. I highly recommend this flatworm exit for anyone with the same nudibranch problem I had. Thank you everyone for all the help and will keep you updated with progress.

 

[Cdogsailr]

I've gotten on top of my nudi's a different, chemical free way. After being away for a couple of weeks I came home to find all zoa colonies closed-up and under attack from these little buggers. Must've arrived on something else about the time I left. Anyway, it was nudi war! My zoa colonies are well established and not readily removable from the tank without major construction involving large live rocks. I diligently picked off the several adults and several coils of eggs over a few days. The zoas started to return to normal and open up. However, I'm realistic enough to know that there were still eggs around somewhere. Sure enough, once hatched the zoas were quick to react and close-up again. The juveniles are very small but can be seen as specks on the zoa bodies. They cannot be picked off or sucked-up easily so I used a different means of attack, freshwater blasting. Every day when I top-up the tank I used my turkey baster full of freshwater to blast off the youngsters. They hate freshwater and release quickly. Also the zoas don't mind as it quickly mixes and zoas also enjoy having regular blasts to clean out any detritus that accumulates in and under them (good habit). Once the nudi's are blasted off the zoas they drift around and end up starving before they can relocate the zoas. After about a week of regular freshwater blasts all the juvi nudi's are gone and the colonies are back to normal. Now it's just close monitoring until I'm sure they're gone. And, it's on to manual removal of the odd sundial snail....

 

[kalgra]

I have only battled them once and used flatworm exit. If you go this route you will most likely need 3 rounds of it to get any unhatched eggs and you will likely kill all or most of any pods and inverts you have.

Good luck, they suck for sure!