I give up, need help with GBTAs and RBTAs.

[Yum Cimil]

I have a problem keeping RBTAs I have a 180 with a sebae anemone I have had over seven years. When I wanted a rose I thought they would be easy so I tried one, sadly it died. This happened three more times. Don’t hate me for this, the first and second time I thought it was shipping, the others made me think again. So I did a lot more research and only came up with chemical warfare between the sebae and the RBTA. I now have a thirty five gallon that has two 96 watt power compacts on it, with a twenty long as a refugium, 500gph of flow. Im adding another 500gph pump with a squid on a closed loop later. I have a small green bta and a small rose bta in it with some leathers. The problem I’m having now is they don’t eat and always hide. They have been doing this for three months. Is it my lighting, flow or something else. They look healthy and not bleached, mouths closed and they are expanded nice, just they are trying to hide away from the light all the time and don’t eat. Is this normal?

 

[Ciarán]

Leathers and anemones together constitute dodgy business IMHO. Thats a very small volume for that many terpene producing creatures. All your invertebrates may be engaging in allelopathy, in a small volume tank that would definitely cause deterioration of the weaker link(s) so to speak. Your tank seems heavily stocked with invertebrates and personally i would only keep one anemone per tank, regardeless of whether they are conspecifics. Other than that i dont really know. If the lighting was insufficinet they would crawl up the walls to the surface and/or shrivel up. I find it baffling that you are having such issues as i have found my BTA very easy to deal with and my current tank has even less volume than yours. If its terpenes irritating your anemones make sure you use activated carbon and protein skimming.

BTW, i've found that anemones don't like too much flow. 500GPH is more than enough for anemones. Make sure to keep them out of the direct current and not downstream from the soft corals.

 

[Yum Cimil]

Ok tanks. I will try running carbon to see if that helps, also I will remove the leathers and put them back in my 180. My 180 has a lot of leathers, sps, lps and anemones and I never had a problem with them. I don’t use skimmers or carbon on my tanks, just refugiums with very few water changes, so it may be that G&RBTAs are more sensitive.

 

[redvipe2010]

I would start doing more water changes in addition to the carbon.

 

[BonsaiNut]

If you REALLY want to keep BTA's and don't know what the problem is, I would start with a bare tank with some live rock. Then, once I had the equipment dialed in (i.e. the anemones were thriving without any other critters in the tank) I would start adding other creatures slowly. Since you set up a separate system, this should not be that hard to do...

 

[Ciarán]

Personally i'd prefer to wait until the tank had stabilised for 6-7 months before adding such sensitive organisms. Im also a bit of a hypocrite as in my current tank, i added my anemone after about 3 months but in retrospect waiting until things stabilised fully is a safer option IMHO. One thing to do is to inspect a potential specimin very closely when you are about to purchase it. I know its probably been mentioned many times before, but examine in particular its basal disk and the surrounding soft jelly-like material of the ectoderm - the epithelial cells. They tear very easily through mishandling by dealers and during collection, a bad tear can spell death for most specimins so afflicted.