And verrucae are?

Sorry. Think of them as wart like structures that the anemone can use to adhere to substrate. From the link I provided: "Most host actinians have, in the upper part, longitudinal rows of small warts (verrucae; singular is verruca) to which particles of gravel may adhere; commonly these are pigmented differently from the rest of the column."

Here is a picture showing the verrucae of one of my carpets (Stichodactyla gigantea):
http://members.shaw.ca/hobiesailor/a...10/carpet5.jpg

Offhand I do not have pictures of the verrucae of H. magnifica versus E. quadricolor, sorry, although a quick google search should yield plenty of results.

Great pic, thanks! I cleverly called them "spots" up to now. :mrgreen:

How often and what do you feed your anemones? Have any trouble with your carpet eating small docile fishies like clown gobies or mandarines?

I do feed all my anemones. For the most part I just feed them mysis every couple of days. Amounts sort of vary based on the individual.

The two carpets I have right now are both S. gigantea and they have been gentle additions to the reef. In fact I had a mandarin who would routinely sleep under one of them. However S. haddoni is a different story, they can and will eat any fish who blunders into them, so caution is definitely advised.

Here is some more info about verrucae:
(From http://web.nhm.ku.edu/tol/glossary/intro.html ).

If you can understand any of that, you have my sympathies!!! :crazyeye:

That site does have a great shot of the verrucae of Heteractis magnifica though, that I can't pass up the chance to post here:
http://web.nhm.ku.edu/tol/glossary/whole/whole.JPG

No, I dont understand any of that, I left my giberish dictionary in my other pants where I store my PhD in biology. :biggrin:

The link to the pictures helped though, thanks.

I have seen that identical pic on a different site, it is a great pic!

oh man Tony.. that was a chore to read that information you posted :razz:

Great picture... That is such a beautiful anemone... if mine is magnifica I sort of wish it had the typical common riterri colours haha.. oh well.

Have you seen any other colours ilke this before on riterri's Tony? It's such a different colour.. dark brown/dark purple with bright neon green tips! I always thought of riterri's as tan coloured or cream/yellowish.

Alright. I took some pictures, but they aren't the greatest. This guy didn't want to close up... I turkey basted him.. rubbed it a bit.. and this is all I got. Hopefully it helps.. I'll keep an eye on it after lights out and see if it closes up or not.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v2...1202Medium.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v2...1203Medium.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v2...1208Medium.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v2...1204Medium.jpg

One last shot..

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v2...1206Medium.jpg

So going by the information.. I would guess now that this is a GBTA.

Hope those pictures help,

Update, the person I was dealing with on RC has now said that it is an H. Magnifica. But no one else has responded yet but him.

Marina's guess has equal weight though. I'm still on the fence, I think it's more like Entacmaea quadricolor than it is Heteractis magnifica but it still really does have some vague ambiguity about it. That is the freakiest looking rim I've ever seen BTW, it looks like alien teeth. I should add neither my BTA's nor my ritteri have a rim like that (well I guess that goes without saying since I already said "I have never seen..." oops).

Here's the thing ... over time that ambiguity will lessen. So it will be interesting to see in a few month's time what we can learn.

I don't see any verrucae at all on that column. A little hard to tell since it has a slight wrinkled appearance instead of fully inflated smoothness. I was looking at my ritteri last night to see if there's anything I can extrapolate here. What I noticed is that I can't see the verrucae on the column by colour alone, since they are the exact same colour as the rest of the column. But by looking at the texture, you can see they are there still (so it's not as obvious as that picture of the pink base above, they are evident only if you really look closely enough).

The tentacle shape is also something that I'm noticing. In the second set of photos they widen a little, then are blunt ended with a tiny "nipple" at the very tip. This is something I've never seen on my ritteri. But I have seen it on BTA's.

In the end: my guess == BTA. With about a 60-70% certainty. :lol:

But like I said, maybe in a few months time it's possible we can take another stab at this and there will be something new to help with the ID.