Clown feeding anemone

[IslandCrow]

Has anyone noticed that their anemone responds quicker when their clownfish brings it food than when you feed the anemone? My guess is that my WSM "roughs it up" a bit. I used to be convinced that the clown was just putting food their to eat later and not necessarily feeding the anemone, since she'd usually pull the food from the mouth area and push it off to the edges. Now, I think she may just know her anemone much better than I do.

 

[unimike]

hmm how does that work, just feeding to clown and he will eventually bring food to the anemone ?

 

[IslandCrow]

If I give my clown a particularly large piece of food (about 3-4x bigger than a large piece of mysis), she'll generally grab it from me and bring to the anemone. Now, there's certainly debate about whether or not the clown is feeding the anemone or just storing the food there for later, and there's a good deal of evidence and reasoning to support the latter, but my anemone does seem to respond to the food quicker nonetheless.

 

[BonsaiNut]

I used to drop feeder guppies into my reef tank - my clowns would race up, grab them, and feed them to the anemone. It was strangely interesting, but I stopped the practice because I was concerned about feeding freshwater fish to saltwater inverts (though I never experienced any negative impact that I could determine).