Starting a reef tank

"Pszemol" wrote on Fri, 28 Sep 2007:
"Don Geddis" wrote in message ...
Just to throw in another: anemones are filled with toxins. If you happen to
accidentally kill one (e.g. it gets caught in an overflow or pump intake),
then you could release a great volume of toxins into the tank all at once.

I disagree totally!

Well, let's have a debate then!

1) Even if an anemone is torn in on overflow or pump intake it is not
guarantee it will die.

Of course it isn't a guarantee of death. But it's surely highly correlated
with near-term death. Happens often enough.

They are pretty hardy animals and can survive
quite a lot of abuse... Think of them more like Aiptasia :-)

Not a chance.

I have a hard time killing Aiptasia anemones even deliberately. Cut them in
half, grind them up, stop feeding, little light. The damn things just show up
everywhere. Can't get rid of them.

If you asked me to kill a rose bubble tip, it wouldn't last a week.

I have witnessed personaly a rose bubble tip anemone sucked into pump
intake the way WHOLE ORAL DISC was removed and anemone survived. Literally
only a stump was left on the rock. In a matter of days the stump healed
and guts stopped hanging out from it. In the two more weeks a small oral
disc was formed with very little tentacles. Anemone started to feed
normally!

That's a great story. But hardly a common one.

Anemones getting ripped apart by pumps, and then dying, is far more common.
Another difference with Aiptasias. You toss a single Aiptasia into a pump,
and your whole tank will be filled with Aiptasias within a month.

In constrast, you toss a rose bubble tip into a pump intake, and you'll
almost certainly not have any rose bubble tip left a month from now. Your
anecdote notwithstanding.

2) Anemone body is a thin bag filled with *water*. Not toxins, water!

Did I restrict my comment to the body of the anemone?

The tentacles are filled with toxins, which is how the anemones regularly kill
nearby corals. They're designed to be released in small amounts, on contact.
But if you grind up a whole bubble tip in a pump, all the toxins from all the
tentacles will be release into the water in a short time period, as the animal
disintegrates.

In the ocean, this isn't a problem. But in a tank with limited water volume,
you can wind up with great trouble for your other livestock.

Deflated animal will have almost zero volume of its body. Even if you
grind it into pieces and let to rot in your tank you will not cause a major
outbreak of ammonia or "toxins" in your tank.

I wasn't talking about ammonia from the decomposition of the physical mass of
the anemone body. You're right that anemones have surprisingly little mass
given their fully-inflated volume.

I was talking about the toxins built up in the attacking tentacles.

3) Injured anemone only LOOKS DEAD and rotting, but this is only an
illusion! Leave it in the tank untouched and in most cases it will
recover.

I disagree completely with your "in most cases" phrase. Yes, it's possible.
But, unlike Aiptasia, you can't take bubble tips and regularly chop them up
into ten pieces with a knife, and expect to get ten healthy individuals in a
few months' time.

These animals have EXTRAORDINARY capabilities to regrow lost parts of their
body and this property is rutinelly used in the asexual propagation of the
anemones. Anyone who had ever problems with Aiptasia or Majano anemones in
their tanks will confirm how hard is to get rid of them even if you scrape
their stump/foot of the rock with a brush... Ornamental anemones like
bubble tips are not much different.

Bubble tips are hugely different in this respect, from Aiptasia and Majanos.
Bubble tips are far, far, far less robust from damage than those other
species.

This is a great example how fish, cats and cows are similar but anemone
totaly different. Try cuttin head of a cat and see if it survive... And
this is exactly what I was talking before.

Sure, of course there are some properties that are different. Fish, cats,
and cows have eyes, for example, and anemones don't.

I still think it's crazy to believe that caring for fish is more similar to
caring for cats/cows than caring for sea anemones.

Agreed. If you kept a Moorish Idol (although I think you said it wasn't
doing that well, unfortunately), you should have no problem with a reef.
Or even with an anemone.

How is the knowledge collected with keeping a morish idol possible to help
someone in keeping a healthy sea anemone???

Obviously, the basics of keeping a stable ocean environment. Salinity,
temperature, water changes, feeding schedule, freshwater topoff, cleaning
the glass, etc. etc. etc.

For a Moorish Idol in particular, it includes a sensitivity to minor
environmental changes, as well as a specialized diet. Most fish you can just
toss anything barely edible into the tank, and they'll get by. You've got to
be a little more careful when taking care of a Moorish Idol. As you
similarly must be a little more careful when taking care of an anemone.

But the basics of care, in terms of 90% of what you spend your days and hours
doing, is the same with any tropical fish tank.

-- Don
__________________________________________________ _____________________________
Don Geddis http://reef.geddis.org/
Measure wealth not by the things you have, but by the things you have for which
you would not take money.