BTA dropping tips?

[paal]

Started with a single BTA about a year ago. It split multiple times and now I have 10-12 healthy looking ones on a single rock island.

A few days ago I saw a tiny piece (0.5 cm) of a BTA-tip floating around in the tank. I then noticed that one of the nems had strange looking tips: It kind of looks like they have been pinched down by something. All the other nems look normal; just one of them is like this. Today I noticed another piece floating around.

In the (terrible) picture below, it is the one in the upper right.
Does anyone have an idea of what is going on? Are they known to drop single tips like this in order to reproduce?

 

[Doge]

I don't think that's how they reproduce.

My torch coral also sometimes drops tips in the tank. Not sure why

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[Small Heavens]

Nems can decide to remove tentacles they happen to not need because of some flow conditions or other (to me) unknown influence. After buying a LTA I noticed it had 3-4 branching tentacles. Some of them had just a slight hint of branching and other had a complete "thumb" on the normal tentacles and it used them (seemingly) normally and it seemed to have no problems with them. It actually looked kinda cute that the Nem had thumbs.

But after the Nem had gotten used to its new position, it chewed them off, yes it is sadly true, the anemone actually chewed it's own thumbs off and grew out new ones that was completely normal.

My guess was, it no longer needed them, that's probably why anemones never made anything more with their lives... anyway.

Another example is that bigger nems have been documented to have shriveled up tentacles that Clownfishes then remove for them. In such cases, the Fishes themselves notice that the Nem is always retracting a specific tentacle, as you said, they pinch them, and then the fish bite it off.

If that is what have happened in your tank on the other hand, I do not know.

I don't think tentacle dropping is related to reproduction but yes anemones does have a variety of ways to get rid of unwanted tentacle-growth to regulate their optimal conditions.