I've been wanting to try my hand at breeding these guys/gals for a while. Both of my main tanks, and my fathers tank are Aiptasia farms. With my dads 75g being the worst offender and my smaller 36 gallon cube-ish being a close second. None of my LFS ever sell these, so I could hopefully offer some to the local community as well as clean up our tanks.
I know Aiptasia farming is the hardest part of this endeavor and I'm going to go about it in 3 ways. First, I've just been cutting the heads off the Aiptasia in my tanks letting them spread to give me a decent base to pull from. I've also set up 1- 20 gallon plastic tub filled with pieces of egg crate to give a substrate for the Aiptasia to cling to. I'm going to follow the protocol written about in this paper:
https://miguelcleal.weebl..._et_al_aquaculture.pdf This boils down to following 3 basic conditions to optimize propagation by pedal laceration... 84 degrees F, total darkness, feeding .5-1 Artemia/ml 2x weekly. The results of the paper show an approximate 20x increase in Aiptasia at 60 days. The results also show crowding the tank results in more, small Aiptasia while more space results in fewer, larger Aiptasia.
*** Edit Below-I also plan to set up an additional tub to see if I can induce sexual reproduction as described in another paper which I can't find at the moment. In that paper, a team was able to produce a steady supply of Aiptasia through sexual reproduction by using a light schedule of 12/12 with white light during the daytime and complete darkness at night and then 1 week out of every month they used a blue moon light during the entire dark time to simulate a full moon. This induced a repeatable spawn that produced tiny Aiptasia that I believe would be ideal for Berghia breeding. The team in this study used 4 tanks and rotated the blue light through them to create a steady supply. At the moment I'm going to use just 1 tank to see how many Aiptasia I can get to settle. If it works well, I'll set up another tank and at least have a harvest every other week.
EDIT: Upon further research it looks like the protocols to initiate sexual reproduction is quite well known, however, there isn't a published protocol for inducing settlement that I can find. Looks like there may be a chemical precursor that is currently unknown that induces meta a settlement.
<message edited by b1llvance on Wednesday, January 06, 2021 4:57 PM>