Caught in the act - Anemone split

Huff747 · Dec 3, 2018

Got home from dinner and made my rounds of the tanks and thought this guy was looking funny. Had move up under a rock and was spread out. Sorry for the poor pictures. It’s an awkward angle and I was trying to point a flashlight and a phone because of where he was positioned.

Came back a bit later to one small strand still connecting them.

Been doing a lot of reading tonight and seems like people say they split when stressed or over fed. Is that always the case? I don’t feed him directly, he catches some when I feed the fish and sometimes the clowns share. And he’s been happy in the same spot for 5.5 months with no changes to lights/temps/flow. Parameters are:

Ph-8.01
Alk-9.24
Cal-421
Mag-1290
Nitrate-12
Phos-.08

The corals, zoas, hammers, lps, and one Acro seem fine and no changes to tank inhabitants for a couple months.

And the lights are 2 kessil A360s

shred5 · Dec 3, 2018

No sometimes they just split when they get to a certain size. They can be perfectly happy and still split.

Stress can actually make them spawn.

James M · Dec 3, 2018

Congrats

cracker · Dec 4, 2018

how long did it take from start to finish or when You 1st saw this?

cromag27 · Dec 4, 2018

nice. sometimes it’s very fast.

Mykesocalreef · Dec 4, 2018

Mine split a week or two ago. It took 35 minutes from when I noticed to split. I got it on video. Not sure how long it was splitting before I noticed. Mine split two days after a large water change.

Fudsey · Dec 4, 2018

Mine split last month and I caught in pics. Took about 2 hours total.

Katrina71 · Dec 4, 2018

Congrats Dad!

Huff747 · Dec 4, 2018

cracker said:
how long did it take from start to finish or when You 1st saw this?

Not too sure on that. Those pictures were taken about 1.5 hours apart but we had been out to dinner so don’t know exactly when it started. And I left it alone after the last picture so not sure when that last strand separated.

Thanks everybody. Was worried something was off that caused the split and I wasn’t finding the cause. I’ve had it for about 9 months now and think he’s probably doubled in size but I wouldn’t call him big compared to some others I’ve seen.

jd371 · Dec 4, 2018

I caught mine when they were just hanging by a thread, I'm up to five now. Need to get rid of them, or start up another tank to move them to because I'm running out of room.

Captain Quint · Dec 4, 2018

Congrats! You can expect more to come.

cracker · Dec 4, 2018

I'm surprised ! I figured it would take a lot longer ,like weeks . Thanks for the reply's !

Huff747 · Dec 4, 2018

Captain Quint said:
Congrats! You can expect more to come.

I'm fine with that in this tank. Most of the corals in this tank are on the sand bed or on their own small rock island in the sand because it's 2 hammers, 2 zoa rocks, a blasto, and a war coral. There's only 2 corals on the main rock structure and one of those is a favia that hasn't encrusted beyond the it's plug and isn't glued down that I could move if needed. The other is an acro that I am half convinced is unkillable. I don't think the nems would want to move by it because that's where most of the flow is directed but that acro has lived through my first year of reefing which included dosing reef flux to try and kill of bryopsis, accidentally filling my top off container with my alkalinity solution instead of kalkwasser which sent the alk beyond what a Hanna meter would read and generally just being a newb.

Huff747 · Dec 14, 2018

Sorry for the all blue picture. Lights were about to go out and I couldn’t find the filter but here are the 2 post split and bubbled up. Was worried for a bit the smaller one may never come out from under the ledge where they went to split but he’s out at least a bit now.