BTA Nipples???? lighting????

[EMBRYOGUY]

ive noticed that my bta demostrates a desired nipple appearance only during the time my actinic is on(24wts). but when the 70wt mh(10K) goes on, the nipples go away and im left with undesired long tentacles for the rest of the day.


with an second bta, with 150wt 14k mh, no nipples. moved to a 70wt 14k and within a week, %60 nipples. same system, same water flow, etc.

all btas given 1 small silverside a week.

anyone with insight on this?

im going experiment with diff lighting parameters to hopefully get some plausible explanation to the infamous question all bta owners want to know.

[Eric Boerner]

The long tenticles and widened disk is from the anemone expanding to take in more light. Its also probably from good water flow too since its resperating.

Actinics have a higher UV output, so maybe the bubbles are a shielding method to keep the UV off the disk. I notice that the disk gets shrunken when mine bubble up.

I have 9 BTA from 3 differant areas. 2 types of them are prone to bubble tips with more actinics than the other 1. So aquired locality may have something to do with it too.

[EMBRYOGUY]

eric, excellant info. thank you. ill keep that in mind and see if notice the same with the local cloned btas. both the ones i noted above are clones.

[slcw]

there are many reasons provided by reefers, yet there is no conclusive evidence to suggest exactly what.

imo, i believe the long tentacles is more as to reach out for passing food. i noticed if i feed regularly, the tentacles tend to be shorter but not necessary bubbly.

other mentioned due to clown fish hosting, but i did not notice such behaviour in my aquarium. there instances where some tentacles are bubbly while the others are long / non bubbly from the same invertebrate.

[EMBRYOGUY]

tks slc,

it seems that there is no definitve concensus.

i can try to feed one of the btas more often and see if the tentacles shorten to test your theory.

thank you.

[phender]

I don't know if it is a collection location thing, a lighting intensity thing or a color temperature thing. All I know is that when I first started keeping anemones pretty much everbody used multiple NO fluorescents for light. A few people were using VHOs and Metal Halides. There was no such thing as PCs or 10k or 20k bulbs. The bulbs used were usually actinics and 5500k-6500K daylight bulbs.

In those days I NEVER personally had a BTA that did not have bubble tips. The only long tentacled BTA I had ever seen was at a LFS under MH lighting.

Since I have switched to PCs I have never had a BTA with bubble tips.

Almost all BTAs when they come into the wholesalers and LFSs have bubble tips.

Have the areas where BTAs are collected changed in the last 20 years? Maybe but I doubt it.

Do they only bubble in lower light intensities? They usually bubble in the wild, and our lighting is generally less intense than on the reef. Maybe there is a window in the middle of the intensities where there are no bubbles.

Are we not providing the proper light spectrum? I don't know, but that's where I would start looking. I don't think actinic is the key, since we have always supplied actinic light. I would look into the lower wavelengths of light, the greens, yellows and reds.

Maybe someone has tackled the spectrum question before. I don't know. I know a lot of smart people find this bubble/no bubble thing interesting, but I don't know of many controlled experiments that have been done. Its too hard to find enough live anemones and keep them alive long enough to perform a controlled experiment.

[slcw]

Originally posted by embryoguy
tks slc,

it seems that there is no definitve concensus.

i can try to feed one of the btas more often and see if the tentacles shorten to test your theory.

thank you.

hehe not a theory...just an oberservation.

yes do let us know your feedback.

staying tune.