Carpet Anemone?

[Delphinus]

Gigantea for sure! That's awesome. Before I had one of these, I had to wait *4 years* for one to arrive in a Calgary store. There was a period of time from about late 1999 to early 2004 where I was checking ALL the stores every week (I'll try not to turn this into my usual "why is anything I'm looking for, hard to find" rant. ). These guys are really my favourite, they are a very beautiful anemone (IMO). They are a natural symbiont for both ocellaris and percula. They don't grow as big as haddoni and they are not voracious eaters of fish (I feed mine mysis but they eat every piece of fish food I offer - right down to tiny things like Cyclops-eeze and crumbs of flake food. But I target feed them mysis, which seems to do well for them). In fact, I used to have a mandarin that would sleep at night right under the "canopy" of one of the carpets - no way would that have happened with a haddoni (haddoni's are sticky like super glue - they don't really go out of their way to catch fish, but if a fish stumbles into them, they won't easily let go - most fish end up being meals. Although haddoni's tend to come in a nice range of colours - not much beats a "fire engine red" haddoni ). The tentacles of gigantea tend to be longer, giving the anemone something of "shag carpet" look to them, and it's really cool watching the tentacles wiggle and vibrate (particularly at feeding time).

Anyhow, I say don't be too hard on your wife. Although not at all what it was sold to her as (so maybe a bit "boo" on the store - but not your wife!!) - this is something of a "holy grail" of carpets.

Ok, I realize I'm geeking out a bit. Sorry

Anyhow the one drawback to gigantea is the delicateness for the first couple of weeks. If you can "make it" to past a month, odds are pretty good that at that point, it's a bulletproof specimen that will weather just about anything. But if you do get to that point, you're in fairly rare company. Time and again I read about reefkeepers over at RC losing one of these during that transitionary period, people have asked me what's my secret, and unfortunately I think there isn't a secret. You either get lucky or you don't. Basically, use common sense and keep your water params in check, feed the anemone and hope for the best. I really do think that the problem lies in the upstream chain (collection/wholesale/shipping/etc.) and all we can do as retail consumers is hope we've gotten one that isn't too far gone by the time we get them.

From everything you've described so far, it sounds like you're off to a promising start. If anything, try to resist the urge to overfeed for the first week or two, but do offer it things like a little mysis every couple of days maybe, and it takes it down and keeps it down, then that's a good sign.

Mine are in a 40g frag tank, unfortunately I don't have many pictures because at 24x24x12 it is somewhat challenging to get good photos of. Here are some photos that I do have (not the most current though - I've gotten lazy on the tank photos). You can't see the BTA's in this shot but my one BTA is in the left back corner behind the brown carpet and the RBTA is in the right back corner behind the green carpet.



You can just see the tips of my rose in the background of this one:


Apparently I need to get some photos showcasing the BTA's! Whoops!