Thank you for sharing. Your experience with anemones is huge. I hope you will give us more many many more articles on your experience with keeping these awesome animals. Looking forward to gaining more knowledge from your experience.
Very cool article! We use transplantation & transfusion in human medicine routinely and it’s proven to save lives time and time again. It makes sense that this would work on other species too. Thanks for sharing!
Thank you for this excellent article, and enough information to actually duplicate what you have done. I always appreciate knowledge, whether proven or not, scientifically speaking, what you showed here is enough to make me a believer.
This was an good read, as this topic has been covered (to my knowledge) very little in the hobby. I hope more people can have success with this method to prove its' worth, or even to prove its' legitimacy.
Nice article. I think the one star review is a little harsh... Taking a researcher's attitude towards this I would say this is anecdotal evidence at least. I would want to know more about the biology of Zoo acquisition - can it be done by the diatom crossing through the gastric mucosa? Or do we think that some of the Zoo are bailing on the dying polyp in close proximity and happen to colonize the anemone just prior to ingestion.
The problem to me (and beautiful anemones btw) - is that there is no way to know whether your intervention made a difference or not. In other words - it could have just been 'time'
I don't have tons of anemones. When I buy and anemone, I look for healthy anemone to buy instead of bleached ones. Only occasionally, I buy a bleached Gigantea or Magnifica. Over the years, I had quite a few, but certainty not enough at any one time to "do a study" so to speak.
Bleached anemone or corals, if partial bleached will return with out transplant. This is true if the the coral or anemone sill have a few, or even 1 or 2, that is not visible. However, If they truly completely bleached, they will have to get the zooxanthellae from and external source.
If I have to proof that this procedure works, all I have to do is keep the anemone in a good, but basically sterile environment to do the transplant. Perhaps put a strong UV sterilizer on the tank. Do the transplant and show that the zooxanthellae return in 10-14 days.
To have enough bleached anemones to do two arm randomized trial is not practical, nor the reward of doing this study is enough to entice anybody to do it.
I keep anemone for a very long time now. Before doing this procedure I had anemone that stay bleached for many months, until they died. I still have picture of a rose BTA back in 1997 that was bleached and died on me after many months. I think I will try to find it and attach it here later.
Doing the procedure, my bleached anemones will regain the zooxanthellae without fail within 14 days. That is all except 1 time, and I learned quite a bit from that failure.
To me, this is just logical and straight forward. An illness that we do know what happened, and a very easy, simple way to correct it. We certainly don't have to do a control experiment to know that jumping out of a building from 4th floor will almost always result in death, while jumping from the same height into a rescue net, almost always result in a live person.
Cheer.
Bleached anemone or corals, if partial bleached will return with out transplant. This is true if the the coral or anemone sill have a few, or even 1 or 2, that is not visible. However, If they truly completely bleached, they will have to get the zooxanthellae from and external source.
If I have to proof that this procedure works, all I have to do is keep the anemone in a good, but basically sterile environment to do the transplant. Perhaps put a strong UV sterilizer on the tank. Do the transplant and show that the zooxanthellae return in 10-14 days.
To have enough bleached anemones to do two arm randomized trial is not practical, nor the reward of doing this study is enough to entice anybody to do it.
I keep anemone for a very long time now. Before doing this procedure I had anemone that stay bleached for many months, until they died. I still have picture of a rose BTA back in 1997 that was bleached and died on me after many months. I think I will try to find it and attach it here later.
Doing the procedure, my bleached anemones will regain the zooxanthellae without fail within 14 days. That is all except 1 time, and I learned quite a bit from that failure.
To me, this is just logical and straight forward. An illness that we do know what happened, and a very easy, simple way to correct it. We certainly don't have to do a control experiment to know that jumping out of a building from 4th floor will almost always result in death, while jumping from the same height into a rescue net, almost always result in a live person.
Cheer.