phender
Active member
FWIW, if you take a look at the scientific literature and compare it to what we know about keeping anemones, almost all of what we know comes from the personal experiences of hobbyists. Do you think that our knowledge of the different lighting needs of the different host anemones came from scientific experiments? How about water flow needs, preferred placement? All of this came from hobbyists who shared information, not scientists doing experiments.
Most the scientific literature talks about chemical pathways and how clownfish interact with their host anemones. Those that do in lab physiology experiments usually fall way short of being useful. He is an example:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1439-0485.2010.00405.x/full
On the surface it seems that this scientist has show that the numbers of zooxanthellae in S. mertensii decline significantly when the animal is starved for 3, 45 and 280 days. Therefore S. mertensii must be fed for its zooxanthellae population to be healthy, right? Well.... if you you look at their methodology, you notice that they were using 40 watt fluorescent lights over their anemones.. My conversion of their light numbers came out to 4500 lumens. This means they were using One 40 watt fluorescent over their tanks to try to keep their anemones alive for 10 months. Their results are completely invalid because they didn't have enough light to keep the zooxanthellae alive. Perhaps they should have used some basic hobby magazines in their abstract.
My suggestion was based on my experience and a host of other's, who have kept anemones long term and who have lost perfectly healthy anemones after feeding large meals. Many of these people are scientists by profession. Check with the people who have kept S. gigantea long term. See if they feed large meals of silverside or whole shrimp.
