Anemone rescue

[ReefTeacher]

Dear Dr. Ron,

I have been reading your ideas about keeping host anemones with great interest recently. This past week I saw a pitiful anemone in a local pet shop labeled "sebae anemone". It looked quite white and its tentacles were short and stubby. I set up a QT tank with stuff I had around...10 gal tank with small power head (protected with a sponge), about 10 lbs of live sand and 5 lbs of live rock from my reef. I let the dust settle from the move of the live sand and went back to the store to see if I could rescue the anemone.

he settled on the rock in my tank and is opening up quite a bit more than he was in the pet shop. I have him under 24 W of PC right now, but will upgrade to 96W (a quad tube) by the end of the week. He is eating well, I have feed cyclops-eeze mostly but yesterday he got a tiny bit of Prime Reef which I was feeding to my reef tank. Under my lights he seems a light green and his tentacles seem to be getting slightly longer in the short time I have had him.

Some questions:
1) What do you suggest I try as foods? He is very small, about 2 inches in diameter. I have a lot of frozen foods including bloodworms, mysis, rotifers, formula 1 and 2, mosquito larvae, krill and silversides. I can fortify with selcon.
2) he seems to regurgitate quickly, about 4-5 hours after being fed. Is this a problem or is it just due to his small size?
3) I believe he is either a H. crispa or H. Malu, but I have no experience with this genus (have only kept bubble tips and LTA's before) Do you know a good way to tell which species I have?
4) Should I add a clown at some time? In my reef tank my maroon clown pair see to it that by bubble tip anemone stays well fed. I would certainly wait untill he is a bit stronger but the tank is very small and I don't want to degrade the water quality.

thanks so much for your help in this matter...it's turning into a nice summer project for me!

[rshimek]

Hi,

[welcome]

The answers to your questions:

1) Feed it fish, silversides - or more preferably lancefish, or other marine fish.

2) It regurgitates rapidly because it isn't getting the right foods or enough of them.

3) It is probably Heteractis crispa.

4) Don't add a clown until the animal gets at least 5 inches in diameter, small anemones can be beaten to death by clowns "loving" them.

Good luck. If and when the animal starts to turn a bit green, tan, or brown, indicating it has picked up a crop of zooxanthellae, you will be well on your way to recovery.

[capncapo]

Dr. Ron,

How long would you recommend that he keep this anemone in a 10 gallon tank should he be able to get it healty? I know that healthy H. Crispas' need a larger tank than this but am sure that it should be OK for a "recovering" animal.

Also, do you see any problems should he decide to add this animal to his existing reef tank that already contains his Entacmaea quadricolor?

Thanks!

[rshimek]

Hi,

As long as the water quality doesn't get too bad, a small tank will work, but I would get it to a larger system as soon as possible.

Generally, two species of anemones in a larger tank, if they are both large will present problems. They will often become aggressive toward one another, sometimes to the point of appearing to "hunt" each other down to fight. The "hunting" behavior is probably an artifact of the animals being confined in a water volume that is too small, resulting in their moving to escape chemicals produced by the other animal, and they randomly walking into each other. To an aquarist that just watches the tank sporadically, it appears that they hunt each other. In actuality, they are trying to avoid each other.

That aside... you can probably keep the two species together for a while, but I wouldn't consider it a long term solution.