Wow, quite a response. No one is saying you're wrong or your personal experience is useless. Mark simply asked me to come and clear up some of the speculation about what was being excreted and how much since this is something I've actually measured. You're getting worked up about things I wasn't even arguing.
I don't need some over paid university professor to do a study on anemone metabolism to show that anemones "rely heavily on protein". When anemones feed well they grow. When they are starved they shrink. This is the same for most animals on the planet, including us. Anemones feed on protein based prey. It's as simply as that. Just because the scientific community may be behind the aquarium hobbyists on this one, doesn't make it any less true.
Just to get things straight- I'm not a professor, nor do most biology professors make much money, especially considering how long they go to school.
This also isn't anything new to them. The scientific community has known for several decades that unfed anemones often shrink, whereas fed specimens grow. That does not imply that they rely
heavily on protein, especially for energy, which was the statement I quoted. It only shows that they can't usually balance their N budget through DIN uptake alone (though it's also known that some can under N enrichment). Even if they only rely on protein for 1% of their N budget you will still get shrinkage without feeding.
Comparing humans or even fish to anemones in this regard completely ignores physiological differences, particularly the ability of anemones to use N sources besides protein.
But we are not comparing anemones to fish. The fact that there are animals that produce more waste than anemones (gram per gram) is not evidence that anemones don't produce a great deal of it themselves. We keep LARGE anemones in systems where we would not think of keeping a equally sized fish. The load that these animals place on our systems is what's important. A large haddoni may place more of a load on the system than the small clownfish it's hosting, even if gram per gram the fish is producing more waste than the anemone.
Admittedly I worded my first post poorly, but you've also ignored the important part of my post about BTAs breaking even with regards to ammonia.
The supposition was made that anemones must excrete a lot of ammonia. I was simply pointing out that in general, inverts (without symbionts) excrete less than fish, sometimes a lot less, so this isn't a great assumption. In fact, we know from measurements on at least two species of zooxanthellate anemones that the rate of ammonia uptake is almost equal to the ammonia production so there's virtually no excretion. When you compare real numbers, an average sized clown excretes about 8 times as much per hour as an 18 inch BTA. When that anemone hosts a clownfish (or shrimp), it acts as a sink for ammonia produced by the fish, and you get a net reduction in the rate of ammonia produced between the two. The anemone is effectively a negative load in respect to ammonia.
Ummm...... I have, and I'm sure many many others have as well..... They appeared to consist of zooxanthellae to me. Of course I'm just another aquarium hobbyist that's not capable of intelligent thought, so....
I'm not sure where this is even coming from. No one here reads minds. The only way anyone knows your results is if you make them public. If you told us about your research into anemone poop previously I missed it. Regardless, anemone poop is clearly not made entirely of zooxanthellae, though that's known to be one component. The fact that it does contain zoox doesn't answer the original question, what makes up the poop, specifically in regard to nutrients. As for a hobbyists results meaning nothing, if you actually read what I wrote in my post rather than what you want to see, you may notice that I recommend that "you guys" as in fellow hobbyists figure it out.
