[Delphinus]

My $0.02 - In and of itself, losing zooxanthellae is not a sign that it's done for. I'm not sure I'm going to do a good job explaining this, bear with me. It can just happen, heck, it can happen to an anemone you've had for years. They just all of a sudden expel their zoox. Sometimes a lighting change can trigger it. Sometimes maybe they're just annoyed at their tenants, evict them, and grow new ones .. I'm not sure.

The flip side is that if the anemone is already on the way out, one of the things it might do is expel its zooxanthellae. But is it on its way out because it expelled its zooxanthellae, or is it expelling zooxanthellae because it's on its way out?

Keeping anemones can be a bit of a black art. For the most part, it seems there's an initial danger zone (and in my experience, any new anemone goes through this - no matter what species it is), lasting anywhere from a couple weeks to a couple months. If they get through that, then the likelihood is that you have a hardy trouble free specimen on your hands. But a lot simply won't get through that, it may have nothing to do with you or your tank, but something that happened during collection or wholesale or transport or whatever. Unfortunately there seems to be an element of, you roll the dice and see what comes up.

I just recently lost my RBTA that I've had for 4 years. It's the oddest thing. One day it was there, the next it wasn't. The weird thing is that it seems to have completely disintegrated to the point where there's no evidence it ever existed. I don't know how it's possible. Anytime I've had an anemone die, there's been a mess left behind. In this case it has simply vanished. If it was a new anemone, I'd be all "Well - Ok - it didn't survive the transition into captivity." But I had it for 4 years! And it was looking fabulous right up to the last day I saw it. I have no idea what happened to it.

Black magic man. Black magic...