How Many Peppermint Shrimp do I need?

[whatnot45]

I have a fairly new 60 gallon SPS Reef + 40 gallon sump/Fuge.

I went on vacation for 4 days, and came home after adding a big ball of chaeto to the sump/fuge and found 5 really big aiptasia anemones in the sump. How many peppermint shrimp should be enough to eat them and keep them in check in my main tank?

Will the peppermint shrimp eat all my pods? (i like having a really large pod population) right now there are copepods everywhere haha.

[mpderksen]

Peppermints are hit or miss, and they only eat the small ones. Get a bottle of AptasiaX and carefully cover the ones you find. I sat "carefully" because they will release spores, or whatever, if you disturb them too much.

[MondoBongo]

if the aiptasia is in the sump, it's not a big deal. as long as it doesn't get sucked in to the return pump and blasted all over.

i've had mixed success with getting my peps to eat large aiptasia. the best results i've had are when i hunt down the larger ones and use something like joe's juice, aiptasia x, etc, etc... to blast them, then let the peppermints handle the smaller ones or hidden ones.

in fact, if they're in the ball of chaeto, you could probably just pluck them out.

the peps are pretty small, and don't really roam too much in free space. mine like to stick in and around the rocks, mostly coming out after dark. so depending on the size of your fuge and the size of the shrimp, i would say in the display i would probably do between 2 - 3, if adding to the sump, i'd go maybe one small pep for each 10 gallons of livable space you have.

in my 75 i only keep them in the display, but when i have introduced them i usually go with 2 - 4. i'm not sure how many i have in there now, because they're so damn good at hiding, but i know i have at least one. i've introduced a total of 10 or so in the couple years the tank has been set up, but i think i've lost most of them over time.

your mileage may vary with how well they eat aiptasia. my first group seemed to do an excellent job, while the second group didn't seem to care too much, leaving a small one for months on one of my acro frag plugs until i nuked it by hand with kalk slurry.

i'm not sure if the peps eat pods as a regular part of their diet, my assumption is that they would. i would wager their impact isn't too bad, they don't seem to have caused any problems in my tank with pod numbers. they will scavenge for whatever else as well. pellets, frozen, whatnot.

one word of caution, make sure you can identify a peppermint shrimp from a camelback shrimp. they look very similar, and i've seen them mislabeled at fish stores before. difference camelbacks are very much not reef safe.

[prickles]

I would agree that peps won't eat the big ones. I have heard that they like to "farm" and keep the big ones around to make little ones that they will eat. Therefor you need to add a few peps and manually zap the big aptasia. I would say four or so would be enough.