Loss of anemones

[jason_mazzy]

any chance of mild stray current?

 

[themcnertney]

any chance of mild stray current?

Dont think so. I did have this issue like six months or so but have found the issue (defect heater) and am now running a ground probe. Also the rest of my tank is doing fantastic leading me to believe that there isn't any stray voltage.

 

[themcnertney]

Well unfortunately I have lost all of my RBTA. Sigh.

 

[Joshky]

BTAs only need to be fed when there's an issue with lighting or have lost most of their zoox (which even still isn't really necessary). I run T5s with 1 LED (T5) bulb and can't see myself going back to full blown LEDs at the moment because I don't like the idea of questioning my lighting.

I think people enjoy feeding their anemones because they think they're doing a good thing, but really the food we offer them is much too large and can actually be quite stressful. If you have good lighting and your anemone isn't NPS, you don't really need to feed, it will get some food from broadcast feeding your fish.

 

[meir]

You know, now that I think about it, I have experienced a similar situation, albeit with two separate tanks. In my old 90 gallon tank, I ran metal halides, and I started with one BTA but had 4-6 before long. They were GBTAs not RBTAs, but still bubble tips.

In my new tank, I run LEDs with minimal T5 supplementation. I can't seem to keep a BTA for anything. They just slowly wither away. On the other hand, I've had fair luck keeping long tentacle anemones under LEDs, so I wonder if this is something peculiar to BTAs. I'm sure there are others out there with LEDs that have no problems with BTAs, but I thought the coincidence was odd.

I happen to be keeping RBTAs under Chinese LEDs and they split and are doing well. Originally lost color but they are coming back.

 

[MurphyJ]

I have 50+ BTAs under Hydra 26s. I run 4 26s on a 5 ft tank and 3 on the 4 ft tank.
The big issue is changing lights too fast. LEDs are far more powerful than we think. I run my green, red and white very low - green and red ramping to only 8 and white maxed at 23. I overdrive my blues, but my total is only 60%.

I feed raw shrimp, ground up once a week. If I remove Nems or change landscape to allow more room I get splits. Otherwise they just get fat and big. Mine spawn every year.

 

[themcnertney]

The big issue is changing lights too fast.

This happened to me after switching from metal hallides with other coral, but doesn't explain why the RBTA's perished months later one by one.

 

[MurphyJ]

For me to help I need more info on how they behaved. What were the changes to the Nems?

A Nem that is starving will slowly decrease in size. When they reach a critical point they will go into the rocks as defense. Of course this only makes it worse as they now have no light to supply the zoo food. This is not an over night response, but slow decline until the end. When they reach critical stage they can go within a day or so.