ideas for getting rid of sponges (1 Viewer)

[Elixibren]

We have a 55G with some corals (flavite, xenia, leather and yellow polyp), a few (dwindling) snails (2 turbos and 1 nassarius), 1 maroon clown, 1 PJ Cardinal and 1 lawnmower blenny. We also suspect we have a mantis shrimp that we are trying to capture (has a home to go to just have to get him out). The problem is finding something to take care of our growing, ugly sponge situation. We have at least 4 nickel-quarter sized white sponges growing in this tank. I've read that large angels will eat them, but our tank is too small to handle that.

What do you guys recommend?

 

[tektite]

Manual removal is your best bet, scrub them off with a toothbrush and siphon them out. Water changes will help too as they'll remove the filter food/nutrients feeding the sponges. Do you have a skimmer on the tank? Only inverts I can think of that eat sponges are nudibranches. Unfortunately the ones that do eat sponges rarely come into LFS, and even if they did most nudibranches will eat only one particular species of sponge, so the odds of getting one that'll help you are extraordinarily slim.