I Fragged My Carpet Last Night

kudos to you Phil! Regrets for the precious lost fishes aside, its a great thing you've done to make this thread and take the time to post and repost/answer.

Its not enough for the commercial coral and anemone farmers to tell folks they chance meet "yeah... just cut the in half" :D Most of these such folks are too busy (or not interested) in heavy message board activity.

And the few other nerds like myself that do post or preach anemone propagation have our work cut out for us with (naturally) skeptics :D

But its folks like you Phil and others that will take the time to detail the application that will make the difference!

Perhaps more than any other cnidarian species collected for the hobby, anemones at large dearly(!) need our aquaculture and conservation efforts. Poor to dismal (import) shipping and (community aquarium) survivability aside... just the very sustainability (rates of recovery and natural fucundity) in the wild is pitiful. Truly pitiful. Anemones are one fo the very few areas that I have to admit the hobby is making a negative impact on the reef :(

But successful domestic aquaculture (starting with basement farmers and other cottage industry growers) can make that concern and others (shorter shipping... improved survivability, etc) go away nicely!


I can't thank you enough for sharing this my friend.

And to all/others... there is no physiological reason why you cannot divide this cnidarian (anemone) but you can cut others as you know (corallimorphs, octocorals, etc).

I (and many others) have successfully cut every anemone known in the trade (though in my case excluding Heteractis magnifica... because I don't think it should be collected or used in the hobby at all... and must practice what I preach).

Anemone prop candidates require the same conditions as propping corals... conditioning for months in advance (heavy feeding, no stress... never propagate in the tank or with newly moved specimens)... use water baths to purge mucus and exudates after slicing... and then good water quality of course to improve healing.

So Phil... whadya say, buddy? another 12 weeks (good feeding) and make 4 anemones? :D Please? :) ;)

Kudos again, my friend.
 
Of course Anthony makes great points here and congrats to Phil for having the guts to actually do it. I just fear that now that Anthony has given everyone permission that we will see a whole lot of Anenome propagation by newbie's or people trying to make a quick $, hopefully not. As he mentioned it takes time to prepare these anenomes and caution and proper care afterwards. Hopefully things will work out and we can all learn something new.
best of luck
 
Ezhoops.

Good point, but one thing that will help is that it takes an experienced reefkeeper (or very very dilligent newbie) to even keep these things alive for any length of time. Of course that will change as we start seeing captive prop anemones in greater numbers

If people start anemone "chop shops", they will learn very quickly that this is not profitable when they are faced with tanks of decomposing anemone parts.
:eek2:

I think we all owe Anthony a big thank you for this one (amongst many other things he has done for the hobby/hobbiest) and thanks also to Phil for this great thread.

Matt
 
Congrats Phil so far i have always loved your Single Mertens now you have 2 to love :-P

been a while since i posted and had my 300 up and running for about
6 months now with nothing but a few fish in it in search of the prized mertens.

but keep the pics coming they are looking like my haddoni i had when it decided to move between 2 rocks and split itself. they are looking very promising. and ill keep my fingers crossed
 
Wow, coming in a bit late (as usual). Interesting timing however as the thought had occured to me to consider fragging my oldest gigantea as it has reached a point where it is getting a bit big to house comfortably in my tank.

However since I house fish in there, I'd have been hesitant (and now, would never even consider it until such time I could isolate the anemone). I am one of the people who post about "massive fish losses" to magnifica, and in general I am just a bit mistrusting of disturbing any large anemone.

I understand Calfo's motivations to encourage this activity, but I think that there isn't enough emphasis on isolating these anemones. Cutting anemones in a typical garden reef with other cherished inhabitants is just asking for trouble IMO (and sorry Phil if I'm peeing on your heartache here for your recent losses.. I'm very sorry to hear about your fish). I'm directing these comments to the general populace who may want to run out and be the next carpet propagator: Remember that most fish (among whatever else we put in our captive reefs) were collected from the wild, thus are deserving of at least living their life out as best as possible, and not losing their lives to something preventable as an anemone incident.

On the one hand, I don't want to contribute to mass paranoia about anemone keeping, but on the other hand, I do think that we tend to get complacent towards keeping anemones in our captive reefs. It needs to be a very carefully measured choice!

Bottom line, I think we do need to see more captive prop methods attempted out there, .. just not at the cost of losing other animals.

Very eye opening thread Phil. Thanks for posting this information for us all to learn something.
 
Anthony / Phil / anyone else

is there a way to check the water or is there some kind of test we can do to check for anything in the water that may come from the anemone that can cause significant fish losses? i mean if we can say its the nemocysts that come off with the slime when we do this can we formulate some kind of trap to catch them? not saying we should all go out and try this but for those in the same situation.
 
FWIW... most anything I have ever written about anemones has been to keep them in species tanks only and without exception. Its one fo the few things I am rather miltitant about. Dating back to my oldest (and repetitive ad nauseum :D) advice on WWM... I dread seeing aquarists mixing anemones with corals. :(

For most species, this is quite unnatural and also a recipe for (eventual) disaster. You do not see most such anemones on the reef anywhere near corals. And the keeping of sessile stinging animals with motile ones is just not good sense.

The unnatural concentrations of cnidarians (coral garden hodge-podge mixes) in an aquarium (and subsequent accumulating noxious elements/exudates) is an invitation for the motile amemones to drift/move away from the comptetition/sensations. Hence the many frequent problems we read about with anemones and corals burning/dying, overflow and pumps intakes and other disasters :(

I also have never recommended anything less than conditioning well in advance and propping outside of the aquarium (water paths/purging... ozone use in the aquarium, etc)

The problem is that some aquarists will read only what they want to read, or hear only what they want to hear... and that's when you see "failures" like new anemones fragged in mixed community tanks and all heck breakling loose, et cetera.

Coral and anemone farming is so simple in so many ways... but strict. Its good animal husbandry. Issues of crowded stressed animals only lead to hardship indeed.

But in the hands of good aquarists following fundamental rules of animal husbandry, we can easily relieve our dependence on wild anemones. :)

As for anemone propagation not being profitable... good heaven's! Quite the contrary. It is staggeringly profitable and productive (far better than most sps corals in fact). On the low end... $5K per year out of a 100 gall feed trough.

Do see theimac.org DVD lecture or the MACNA one for this year (a few weeks away). Its spelled out in my presentation. These orgs make DVDs and sell them fairly cheap. The speakers don't make a penny on it... please support these conferences by DVD sales if you cannot attend the events. A lot of quite good info across the board (clubs often buy a set of these such DVDs to use for backups at meetings)

kindly, Anth-
 
as per above,keefsama2003, my friend... propagation of corals and anemones in general needs to be done in species specific tanks. Its a matter of displaying versus farming and the twixt shall not mix :D
 
And it sounds like it might be best to keep anemones in individual hospital tanks after propagation for quite a while, too.
 
Anthony, I think MDPs point was not that farming anemones is not profitable but rather that setting up a "chop shop" with poor husbandry will result in many dead animals and will thus not be profitable. (i.e. only those who take good care of tehir animal charges will make money.)

How many generations removed from the reef do you need before you'll be willing to keep a magnifica?

I am a huge proponent of propogating anemones like we do most corals and look forward to a day when our hobby is not taking anemones out of the seas faster than they can be easily replenished by nature.
 
<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=8082121#post8082121 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by keefsama2003
Anthony / Phil / anyone else

is there a way to check the water or is there some kind of test we can do to check for anything in the water that may come from the anemone that can cause significant fish losses? i mean if we can say its the nemocysts that come off with the slime when we do this can we formulate some kind of trap to catch them? not saying we should all go out and try this but for those in the same situation.
Click to expand...

I am a little bit sensitive to the stings of my Merten's carpet. Even when cleaning the tank I can sence a little tingle. I'm my case, my hands and arms did not sence any nematocyst activity in the water when my fish were stressed/dying. It was obvious however that the anemone was producing lots of slime.
That is not very scientific, but that's all I got. :)
 
If I ever do this again I would certainly do things differently. The size of this anemone made the logistics a little more difficult than fragging a BTA.
In the future I would get a couple grey food service trays and plumb them together in parallel to their own sump with a mechanical and chemical filter. These would be used as de-sliming tanks. I knew it was important to de-slime the cut anemones, but I was under impression that this was for the anemones health and not for the safety of the fish. I did try to rinse the slime from the anemone, but it produced slime for over an hour. There is no way I could have rinsed the anemone for that long with established water from their tank. Next time I will do a large water change after I pull the anemone and use the waste water in the de-sliming trays.
Since there was no way I was going to be able to control the slime problem, I figured the best solution would be to get the anemone back into the tank that had been supporting it for three years. It was a good decision for the anemone, a bad one for the fish. Yes, I have read that disturbed H. magnifica have produced something that caused fish wipe-outs in tanks, but I had never heard of anything like that happening with any type of carpet, and I've been around a while. Now I know and it has been documented, or maybe it already was and I missed it.
Quite frankly, much of what I found on the internet is contradictory. In one case an expert says to "just cut it in half and put it back in the aquarium as close to where it was as possible". In another statement, the same person says the anemone should be put into isolation to avoid chemical warfare that may exist in its normal tank. It is very difficult to find information on what to do in the time frame after the cut is made. I believe MDP has found this to be true in his preparation for dividing his gigantea.
A lot of people are asking questions and a lot of people are talking about it, but the answers to most people's questions are overly simplified.
I know Matt (MDP) posted a question on another board a few days ago. From the answer I couldn't tell if he was supposed to cut his anemone while it was underwater in his display tank or if he was supposed to separate the two halves in the display after they had been cut. Either way, to me a "display" is a tank with other inverts and fish. (this is the same expert that gave the advice above) I'm glad I didn't read this before I made my cut, or I would be very upset with the expert. As is, I am just a little disappointed in myself.
 
No, no. I hope you didn't take my statement above as criticism. You are being the guinea pig for the rest of us and, from what I can tell, the rest of us are trying to figure out some sort of protocol from your experience. Thank you for documenting for us.

Is it possible for you to get any new pics for us anytime soon? Thanks!
 
Seems that you would have felt nematocysts if the water was full of them. I wonder if there may have been a drastic pH change. The inside of an anemone is just a big digestive cavity. That usually means low pH. Big anemone, 50 gallon tank, maybe dumped a bunch of acidic water that overwhelmed the buffering capacity. Next brave soul should check the pH of all that water that spills out after the slice. Other than that, all that slime just may have been too much tox all at once. A good cleansing system will go a long way in the future.

Dan
 
dantodd.

Thanks for that. As you note I was referring to the "chop shop" we see with zoos and SPS wherby they are imported because of their rarity/high value or demand and immediately fragged and sold on.

The point I was making was that this simply won't be possible with anemones. Too much TLC is needed before the propagation can start. Thus hopefully anemone prop will/can only be carried out by those who know what they are doing and not those just looking to make a fast buck.
 
<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=8084061#post8084061 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by "Umm, fish?"
No, no. I hope you didn't take my statement above as criticism. You are being the guinea pig for the rest of us and, from what I can tell, the rest of us are trying to figure out some sort of protocol from your experience. Thank you for documenting for us.

Is it possible for you to get any new pics for us anytime soon? Thanks!
Click to expand...

Aww, I was just being a little over sensitive. I wasn't barking back at you anyway.
After I re-read the posts I was responding to, I almost deleted my last post, but I looked at my post again and figured there was some info there that people might see as valuable or might share my frustration, so I let it stay.

I didn't take any pictures today because they look the same as yesterday. I am considering releasing the anemone in the basket back into the aquarium. I'm not sure that it is getting enough flow and its getting more light than it is used to. I will wait until tomorrow to decide in case anyone wants to give some input.

I fed the clownfish some frozen Formula 1 last night. Some food stuck to the tentacles of both anemones(I consider that a good sign). Neither anemone brought the food to their mouth. I'm guessing because they don't actually have one yet! :D

I will post pics tomorrow whether I think they look the same or not. Maybe someone will see something that I need to watch that I haven't noticed
 
Phil,

That was a very brave move and I compliment you for having the nerve to try it.

I like your idea of using some types of trays along with some mechanical and chemical fitration for a rinsing system. I will be very interested to see your results in the coming months.

You are always a very informative topic creator and very positive in all your replies. I hope everything works out for the best.

Dave
 
Phil,

Phil,

Nice job! I wished that I could have been there to observe the process.
Thanks for sharing the valuable info with us. May be some day soon, there would be more aquacultured large sea anemones available to us all.
Thanks
 
<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=8085540#post8085540 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by 55semireef
So how come many people end up failing keeping carpets under pcs (excluding haddonis)?
Click to expand...
Most folks are failing to keep carpets under any kind of lighting.

As far as PCs, IMHO: most folks are not running enough tubes for the popular selections(too little daylight, too much 10K/03), don't change the bulbs with proper frequency, and are not likely using enough tubes in general.

fwiw: I almost always treat my bleached anemones to recovery under 3x28wt pendants in shallow tanks until they color up....then to MH's. PCs have a place in the hobby, not over my 32" deep tanks, but they definitely have a place.
 
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