LTA won't attach

dieselkeeper

New member
I have a LTA for over a month. It was in my nem tank with a ritteri and a mertens. I dug a hole in the sandbed down to the bottom in the corner. It just lays there. It briefly attached a small portion of its foot to the side glass. Which did not last long. The carpets did not like the flow turned down due to letting the LTA time to attach. Starting to move. So I moved it to my 210 gal. Low flow. Same thing. I tried standing it up in a coffee mug with and without sand, still does not attach. It eventually some how gets out of the mug and lays on the sandbed. The foot shows no sign of injury. Any advise?
 
Hey, I actually only have experience with LTAs.
When you say LTA I hope you are referring to the Macrodactyla Doreensis and NOT the condy? The condy is sometimes mistakenly called LTA in the trade but LTAs are the Macrodactylas only. I suppose you know your stuff and we are talking about a so-called red foot sand digging anemone.

I suggest that you dont mix so many species of aquaria when most expert advice you keep them alone in specimen tanks, but I don't have experience with that.

LTAs need time, do not expect it to choose to stay because of one month passing :)

Make sure it have medium flow that it likes and allow it to consider the spot for some time before it makes up its mind about it.

Make sure it feels like food will "flow directly into its face", if your tanks does not have lots of zooplankton, buying some kind of live food and pretending that the flow just happen to bring lots of food to the anemone can help it choose to stay but they have a hard time actually rearranging their structure to the new places and will take their time to taste the conditions before engaging in the energy needed to dig in.

Remember that in the wild some of them have grown upright and some have grown anchored more horizontally, I think they have different habits of how they want to be placed so yours might also be showing signs of not recognising something it can attached to, they seem to feel comfortable with their foot inside a small cave, I only ever had trouble with this when a pair of wild caught fishes dug the Nem out of the sand bed and the Nem landed on its mouth and could not turn over in time and ran out of healthy oxygen and died :)

Try just giving it time and keep trying to figure out if you can change flow or LR to accommodate it, they run out of energy real fast when trying to acclimate to new conditions but they do also study the surroundings for some time, probably because the ocean would change a lot more over a couple of months than your tank will :)

You are thinking, why doesn't it notice how great my tank is yet, the Nem is thinking nothing obviously but it does still consider if this new place is good for it or of it should try jumping the next flow to find the perfect spot. The live feedings with any zooplankton, I used mostly rotifers and Copepods, might help calm its need to investigate if your spot is perfect ;)
 
I have a LTA for over a month. It was in my nem tank with a ritteri and a mertens. I dug a hole in the sandbed down to the bottom in the corner. It just lays there. It briefly attached a small portion of its foot to the side glass. Which did not last long. The carpets did not like the flow turned down due to letting the LTA time to attach. Starting to move. So I moved it to my 210 gal. Low flow. Same thing. I tried standing it up in a coffee mug with and without sand, still does not attach. It eventually some how gets out of the mug and lays on the sandbed. The foot shows no sign of injury. Any advise?

Did you try putting it on a piece of rock? I know many sites say they prefer sand, but sometimes you can get them to attach at the base of a piece of rock where the sand and rock meet.
 
LTA won't attach

mine lived in a flowerpot since i put it into my tank. It attached to the flowerpot. The fake anemone is there too I had it since last year. It grew so much. I can't even see the flowerpot anymore.


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