Gigantea - where are the zooxanthellae?

[Colorfulreefaqu]

Nice work.

I believe what the 2nd article stated about why the anemone's bleach may be a result of stress.

I believe when the anemone becomes stressed and gets infection, that the health of that animal begins an obvious decline which results in bleaching depending on the level of stress or severity of the infection. I also believe that it depends of other factors as well. I think that depending on what the anemone has had to eat, lighting, and previous health before the nem was stressed or became infected contributes to the bleaching.

 

[Colorfulreefaqu]

For example:

Pete's gig's bleached for one of three reasons IMO.

1. Stress
2. Water quality
3. Lighting

Stress and water quality go hand in hand. So this leaves me with two logical answers.

1. Stress
2. Lighting

The most logical would be stress, because his lighting never changed and now they're coloring up.

I think of it like this:

What happens when a human becomes so stressed with the pressure of everyday life? So people do not tolerate stressful situations well and it can show physically. They can start to loose weight, break out with stress bumps all over their body, and as we all know some go as far as suicide. So is it not very likely that when a gig becomes very stressed they just bleach. I'm starting to think they're claustrophobic.

 

[Irishdolphin]

Is stress the right word here? I understand that beyond the 'physical' demands on humans, we can also also react to non-physical triggers / drivers (emotional, mental etc) but I (maybe naively) assumed that you can't really 'upset' a nem in a non-physical sense; i.e. if you get all the physical aspects (light, water quality etc. etc) right then it should be ok

Apologies if I'm being too pedantic on this. Maybe when we say 'stress' it is just a general term to cover the unknown physical problems we are encountering?

 

[Colorfulreefaqu]

Not real sure. I'm thinking just overall health in general. Either stress or something else along those lines definitely triggers the bleaching.

 

[D-Nak]

If you're referring to "oxidative stress" as in the article, that's not the same as what we commonly refer to as "stress".

In what you're describing, stress occurs as a result of a contributor, which in turn causes a different result. For example, poor water quality and bad light are both contributors that cause stress, but both may cause bleaching. What we don't know is to the extent as to which will cause bleaching.

I agree with Irishdolphin -- anemones don't have a brain and therefore don't have emotions, so they can't get "stressed out".

 

[OrionN]

In the wild, we need to take temperature (global warming or variation of temp from year to year), pollution (run off from water discharge), sedimentation (dredging of shipping channels), overgrowth by algae (an example is the death of sea urchin about 10 years ago in the Caribbean), predation (Crown of thorns starfish or other coral eating fish)
We can see various condition that will cause similar stress to coral s in our tank.