How To Be Friends With Anemones
Sea anemones might not be the most mobile of organisms, but they are fascinating creatures and play a major role in marine ecosystems.
If you are building an aquarium, these wonderful creatures can greatly enhance the visual appeal of your tanks as well as performing important roles in the food chain. However, as Petponder notes, you need to be well informed about what you are doing before you seek an anemone for sale.
A lot of skill and knowledge is required to keep an anemone live and healthy. If you do, it could live up to 80 years.
Anemones may look like flowers, but they are not carnivorous plants. Instead, they are related to other marine invertebrate animals like corals and jellyfish. They attach themselves to the sea floor or a rock using a sac at their base with an adhesive foot to anchor themselves in position. There are hundreds of species, with many of them living in the temperate waters around the coast of the UK.
A key consideration is the size of the tank, as the largest anemones can grow to up to 6ft in diameter. In that instance, they need a big tank with over 300 gallons of water. This tank should best have the pump and heater kept away from the creature, as it can get caught in a pump and burned by a heater.
There should also be several rocks in the tank, as this gives the anemone the chance to move to a different one to attach it to, although they do not change position often.
You will also need to carefully maintain the salinity of the water between 1.024 and 1.026 sg, with the temperature kept between 24 and 28 degrees Celsius (75-82 Fahrenheit).
Anemones will need regular feeding and while some unfortunate smaller fish in your tank may provide the odd meal, that is not exactly ideal. They should be fed once a week on creatures like shrimps, scallops or mussels.
In the natural world they feed opportunistically, catching passing prey in their tentacles and injecting them with venom before dragging their meals into their mouths.
However, that does not mean they eat everything. Anemones also have symbiotic relationships with hermit crabs and clownfish. In the former case, they often attach themselves to the shells of the crabs, which will bring more prey into reach as they move around. At the same time, their poisonous tentacles help protect the crabs from predators.
Clownfish will keep the anemone in good shape by eating algae from its surface. However, clownfish are omnivores and some of their food can also be eaten by anemones.
However, not all clownfish interact with every kind of anemone. Clark’s Clownfish is a subspecies that will enjoy a symbiotic relationship with ten different kinds of anemones, but there are 28 other kinds of clownfish that only interact with some of them, so it is important to do your research to get a good match.
Keeping sea anemones is not as simple a task as it might seem, but with a carefully nurtured aquarium set-up, you can keep these beautiful creatures in fine style for a long time.