ACBlinky
Premium Member
I have a little rock flower anemone (Epicystis crucifer?), and tonight I witnessed it doing something I've never seen before.
The anemone has made a home at the base of a rock, with its foot on a diagonal (not sure if it's attached to the bottom or the rock, but it touches the sand, which is only about 1/8" deep there thanks to my maroon female's excavations). Normally, all I can see is the disc and tentacles.
Tonight when I took a look into the dark tank, I could clearly see the base, then all the little fluorescent pink dots (verrucae?) that are usually hidden under the disc, and the tentacles were pointed straight up. The nem was stretched way up, looking very much like a fat mushroom stem without the cap on top - the tentacles were all bunched together. Then the top unfurled quickly and the disc turned nearly inside out, and a lot of whitish fluid came puffing out of the mouth.
This repeated several times over about 15 minutes. Fold in and stretch up, open, turn inside out, expel whitish goo, and slowly fold in again.
I made sure it had a good meal yesterday, but it eats regularly and I've never seen this behaviour -- was it just having a poop, and I happened to catch it in the act? The substance it was expelling was white and liquid
, so I wondered if it might be something other than waste, though I don't know what...
The anemone has made a home at the base of a rock, with its foot on a diagonal (not sure if it's attached to the bottom or the rock, but it touches the sand, which is only about 1/8" deep there thanks to my maroon female's excavations). Normally, all I can see is the disc and tentacles.
Tonight when I took a look into the dark tank, I could clearly see the base, then all the little fluorescent pink dots (verrucae?) that are usually hidden under the disc, and the tentacles were pointed straight up. The nem was stretched way up, looking very much like a fat mushroom stem without the cap on top - the tentacles were all bunched together. Then the top unfurled quickly and the disc turned nearly inside out, and a lot of whitish fluid came puffing out of the mouth.
This repeated several times over about 15 minutes. Fold in and stretch up, open, turn inside out, expel whitish goo, and slowly fold in again.
I made sure it had a good meal yesterday, but it eats regularly and I've never seen this behaviour -- was it just having a poop, and I happened to catch it in the act? The substance it was expelling was white and liquid
, so I wondered if it might be something other than waste, though I don't know what...
