Dry shipping anemone's

[sgotz]

I've heard of a few places that use the dry shipping method for anemone's. is this more helpful or detrimental?

what is the reasoning behind them dry?

Regards,
Steve

[rshimek]

Hi Steve,

It should help.

The rationale behind "dry" shipping is this...

If the organisms are shipped in water that covers them, they remain metabolically active and use up all the oxygen in the water. Oxygen can only be replaced in water by diffusion (aided by surface turbulance during shipping). This is a slow process. Mixing the water to the oxygen to the organism also is slow and inefficient. The net result is that the animal suffers oxygen deprivation, and may die.

If the organism is shipped moist, with the relative humidity in the bag at 100%, oxygen is used up by the critter as before, but then oxygen diffuses across the very thin water layer that remains over the organism and into the organism. As these distances are very small, the diffusion can do this rapidly. The organism doesn't suffer oxygen deprivation and arrives in good shape.

So... damp shipping should work very well for just about every thing. As long as the animal is moist and as long as the humidity remains at 100% in the bag it should be okay.

[billsreef]

Hi Guy's,

IME based on unpacking hundreds of Anemones they most definately fair better when shipped "dry", the mortality rate when shipped wet is significantly higher.

[sgotz]

What's the procedure for acclimating dry shipped anemone's?

-Steve

[billsreef]

Float for temp and just plop them in ;) Barring anemones that had physical damage, such as from being improperly removed from the substrate, I have had a 100% survival rate using this method :)

[sgotz]

So a variation in salinity doens't matter?

-Steve

[billsreef]

So long as your keeping your tank at close to normal seawater values thier should not be a significant enough difference matter. Many reef animals can be subject to fluctuations in both temp and salinity due to major rain storms and simple changes in currents causing upwelling that will yield wider fluctuations than we tend to think that our animals can handle, yet they do just fine in nature with those fluctuations ;) They same can be said for acclimating fish believe it or not, though they do need to be kept in water :D