An anemone that lets go & wanders about a tank is an unhappy anemone. Puking out "white stuff" is a major stress response. In the future, if the situation is iffy, you may want to consider giving it or placing it temporarily to somebody who has a well established tank with good lighting. If one dies in your tank, it will turn to mush & could very possibly nuke the whole tank, so I'm sorry to hear of your loss but I'm glad you removed it before it mushed out. I've seen it happen in a LFS & they lost a lot of nice corals out of their display tank.

For the lighting situation, maybe consider switching out an actinic for more useable 10000k lighting.

By the way, I've also gone too fast in the past :cry: & I must concur with the opinions stated above that slowing down will save lives (fishes & corals) & save your $$. If you add 1 (or at least only a few small fish) at a time, it'll allow your system to adjust to the increased bioload. If you add too many at a time, you'll shock the system & cause an ammonia spike because the existing nitrosomal bacteria are not able to handle the extra fish waste.

Also, check out www.wetwebmedia.com. Awesome site full of good info & run by experienced reefers & fish lovers like Bob Fenner who aren't trying to sell you a bunch of stuff. Doing your research first will help you be more successful in this $$$ hobby. When you're at the LFS, if you see something you really like but aren't sure you can keep it alive, put it on hold, & do your research before you purchase something with almost zero survival rates. :evil:

Good luck.

Anthony

The way that I figure it.... ask as many questions as you can while you're there... but take all the info with a grain of salt. Get as much info as possible, then go home and research it yourself on the net. My only problem with this is that I have yet to find a site that I fully trust, and it seems that a lot of the sites out there have varying opinions on everything. On that note... not to hijack... anyone have any recommendations for trustworthy sites?

Online communities are usually pretty good. Places like Reef-Central, reefs.org, etc are huge online communities with millions of posts and thousands of users, so you're bound to find an answer to your question (though it can be quite difficult at times).

Also, sites like WetWebMedia (I think that's what its called) are also sites with a lot of useful information.

CanReef is pretty good too!

For the record.... I see Canreef as a very good resource.... but sometimes you need to wait for a while to get the info that you need... I'm talking about a good site that has info ready and posted. From what I've found so far tehy all seem to have different info. Or different fish!!! Who knows.

Patience is a virtue and a great asset in this hobby... :wink: