Anemones and corals

mogurnda

vaguely present
Apr 29, 2003
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Well, after deciding that an anemone won't work in my tank, I am having second thoughts. I have a 20 gallon with 130 watts of PC lighting. The soft corals (sarcohpyton, green star polyp, tubipora) are thriving, and the montipora frags have settled in nicely. I was thinking that a bubble-tipped anemone might be fun, but it might be trouble. Any thoughts?
As far as the other specs, I am running a bakpak 2R skimmer, a 12" mini-refugium with a huge wad of chaetomorpha, a (nominally) 500 gph closed-loop system. Two ocellaris clowns, 2 cleaners shrimp, and a sizable collection of janitors and hitchhikers (see my specs post).
 
The biggest problem with anemones is getting them to attach, without roaming around and injuring the other corals and critters that can't get out of it's way.
 
I guess that's my biggest worry, and why I had originally decided to avoid it. The tank is small, and I could easily see the anemone wreaking havoc before settling down.
It would be fun to have an anemone, and I was hoping that someone would say "sure, I've done it, no problem."
I'll just have to add more corals, I guess.
 
We've tried anemones a couple times. Each time, they've meandered around, causing problems for 2-3 days. The easiest to support--a curly-que--was finally banished to the FO tank. It would sit happily for 2-3 months, then cruise the entire tank for a week before settling down again. Since we couldn't determine what made it go wandering, we moved it out. It doesn't cause problem in the FO, though it still moves around a bit.

Ditto for a LTA--it settled too closely to a brain and was killed by the stingers. Flower anemones thrived, split, covered a rock, then suddenly shrunk down into the sand and were never seen again. As a result, we avoid anemones. I know my significant other is considering one for the invert tank we're setting up again--we'll see.
 
Only experience I have is with a condy that came as a freebie. Did really well until it moved to a place that I couldn't reach to feed it. Slowly shrank and faded away.
 
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