Ritteri Anemone Help!

bradam

New member
I've read alot on here but never posted since, up until today, I've never really had a major issue. I been running a 240 reef tank for about 5 years or so now, my main goal was always to have a huge Ritteri Anemone as a center piece of sorts. I've had the same green bubble tip for about 4 years doing great and has split off many times for me.

Everytime I go in the pet store I always look for a healthy Ritteri Anemone and seldom do I ever find one.. but when I do it's generally half dead looking so I pass.

But.. last friday I happened to be sort of out of town and stopped in a local salt water store and wow.. they had a fairly decent looking Ritteri Anemone! So I snatched him up.. brought him home.. slooowly drip acclimated him over and placed him in what I had thought was a pretty good spot, figuring he'd move around and eventually settle somewhere. My pair of Ocellaris Clownfish where playing in him within literally 2 minutes.

But sadly he just kind of went flat and seeped down into a space between the rocks. I gave him a few days and finally carefully rearanged the rocks to find he had made it all the way to the bottom and kind of folded over on himself like a badly flipped pancake. My poor clowns have been quite distressed and keep darting around like frantically tugging at his tentacles like trying to right him. So today, not knowing what else to do as it's been like that for 2 days I tried to carefully unfold him and to my surprise he's shedding parts of himself off.

What should I do? Just leave him be and hope for the best? I'm starting to worry now he may up and die and nuke my tank on me. At what point should I give up all hope and remove him?
 
Ouch, man I'm sorry to hear that. Did you do anything to acclimate him to your lights? Could you post your parameters as they are right now? These two things are likely the source of your trouble if the anemone was truly healthy, and will be critical to getting good advice. HTH
 
here's a photo of him as of about 3 minutes ago

IMG_0995web.jpg
 
Ouch, man I'm sorry to hear that. Did you do anything to acclimate him to your lights? Could you post your parameters as they are right now? These two things are likely the source of your trouble if the anemone was truly healthy, and will be critical to getting good advice. HTH

I have a corallife 250 hqi bar on the top, I just shut off the hqi that shines on his side of the tank for 2 days, then turned it on hoping maybe that'd help him. Going to double check the parameters now as there were all fine as of friday
 
I had the exact same experience with a baby carpet. It went and hid, I dug it out a couple times but it kept crawling back and continued to rot until my nassarius snails made it final.
 
Ouch, man I'm sorry to hear that. Did you do anything to acclimate him to your lights? Could you post your parameters as they are right now? These two things are likely the source of your trouble if the anemone was truly healthy, and will be critical to getting good advice. HTH

Nitrate 0
Nitrite 0
Ammonia 0
Ph 7.8
KH 7.4 - Alk 2.63
Salt 48.5

I have my chiller set to 79, Salts a wee bit low, I normally keep it around 50 but everything else seems fine
 
Oh... Dead. :(

Clean it out.

Sorry.

/sniffle

I do anything wrong? I'm kinda pokey when it comes to adding things to my tank, had thought everything was ready for 'em :sad2:

I managed to get some loveable flatworms about a year ago, took a good 3-4 months to get rid of them, would the flatworm exit have anything to do with it? I had thought all that stuff would be long gone by now though.


On a side note I took about 30 photos and that was 1 of 2 that didn't have the clowns blocking the view lol
 
In all honesty it's not technically dead right now but I have never heard of/had one get better after being that far gone. Even in "perfect" conditions.

I have never had a Ritteri myself so I can't say for sure what happened. But if that salt is a measure of PPT, your way high. Normal seawater is something like 35 I think.
 
i had a ritteri for almost 2 years. my secret was to give it a bath of sun light. I was against water changes so im guessing all of my heavy metals were gone and all of the crap found in the salt was to bare minimum levels. the like to be fed cyclop eez.
 
Probably nothing you could have done. Mags aren't the best shippers and so it could have been in decline before you added it to your tank. At this point, you want to get the anemone out of the tank quickly.
 
In all honesty it's not technically dead right now but I have never heard of/had one get better after being that far gone. Even in "perfect" conditions.

I have never had a Ritteri myself so I can't say for sure what happened. But if that salt is a measure of PPT, your way high. Normal seawater is something like 35 I think.

My bad I wasn't sure what the measurement is called. Its a pinpoint digital salinity meter. 50 mS comes out as 1.024 specific gravity. I never liked the float meters because it seemed if I checked the salt 10 times I'd get 10 slightly different readings heh

Conversion chart is here http://www.americanmarineusa.com/salinityconversion.html

Was going to try and fish it out this morning but oddly about 1/2 the foot is still attached to the rocks and my clownfish are very stubbornly defending it. Was running a tad late for work so I figure I"ll get it out when I get home.
 
That anemone is dead. It is past dead and is rotting.

I'm not sure that you did anything wrong, per se. Sounds like your actions were exactly what they should have been relative to adding new critters to your system. It comes down to conditions in your tank, and the health of the in-coming anemone.

Anemones are particularly susceptible to bacterial infection and are not good shippers. Sometimes an anemone can come in that looks "ok" but is actually very sick.

Do you have a full tank shot? Sometimes it helps to gauge the general health of the system by viewing the health of the other inhabitants.
 
Fwiw most of what I have read suggest yhat A H.Mag generally does not do well with other types of anemones in the same system.. There are exceptions, but I dont know that I would try it.
 
Fwiw most of what I have read suggest yhat A H.Mag generally does not do well with other types of anemones in the same system.. There are exceptions, but I dont know that I would try it.

That I did not know, haven't read that anywhere else yet. I do have a green bubble tip in the tank I've had for over 4 years now. I had thought that would only matter if they somehow got close enough to start stinging each other?


I'll put up a pic or 2 of the whole tank when I get home, hopefully there's something I did/am doing wrong you can spot so I dont kill another poor Ritteri
 
The fact that you have kept a BTA for 4 years makes me think that you did nothing wrong and that it was going to die from the start. I'm usually the first in line to tell people when they did something wrong, but in this case I think you did everything right and just got screwed. I mean you waited 4 years to add it, you found the most healthy one you could find, you drip acclimated and you didn't shock it with your lights... Clean it out, find a healthier one and try again. Best of luck.
 
Nitrate 0
Nitrite 0
Ammonia 0
Ph 7.8
KH 7.4 - Alk 2.63
Salt 48.5

I have my chiller set to 79, Salts a wee bit low, I normally keep it around 50 but everything else seems fine

What is that unit of measure for your "salt" ? It doesn't look familiar to me. Used to seeing either, 1.026 or 35 PPT.
 
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