Recovery of bleeched BTA

[anglfish]

I was wondering if anyone has experience with this. I read up on the procedure on how to feed small daily amounts of food etc.
But how long does it take for a bleeched anemone to recover? weeks? months? Or does it totally depend on the anemone and the degree of bleeching?

Thanks

[Delphinus]

You're basically right in that it depends on the anemone and the degree of bleaching, and the amount and kinds of light available and blah blah blah.. but basically I would say it tends to be in the order of a few weeks to notice a real difference.

[Delphinus]

Here's a picture of a bleached carpet I bought a couple years back. Although it looked bleached I knew it was an otherwise healthy specimen. Sometimes an anemone isn't necessarily heathy enough to recover, so again it just goes back to the "it does depend on the anemone." But just to give you a timeline, this was the anemone when I bought it (May 12, 2004):


Here it is again approximately 6 weeks later (June 21, 2004):


Obviously the change was gradual, so it did not take fully 6 weeks to go from bleached to non-bleached. Afraid I don't really remember how long it took to notice a difference, since it was more of the nature of "it looks a tiny bit darker today than it did yesterday". I really should have taken a picture every day and then I could have done a time-lapse, that would have been kinda fun. Oh well.

[OCDP]

Agreed. Within a month and a half (max) you should notice significant improvement, given the BTA is being fed , and has proper paramaters and lighting, etc..

[Quagmire]

Have you been able to feed it yet? If it wont take food,try Mysid shrimp but dont rinse off the packing juice.The juice causes algae,but it should trigger a feeding response.If its realy sick,it may take a few tries.Good luck

[anglfish]

Originally Posted by Quagmire

Have you been able to feed it yet? If it wont take food,try Mysid shrimp but dont rinse off the packing juice.The juice causes algae,but it should trigger a feeding response.If its realy sick,it may take a few tries.Good luck

Oh it's eating
I have had it now for a month and I feed small shrimp, but so far I have not fed very often (maybe once every 5 days) as I did not want to overfeed it. The anemone looks very healthy, fully inflated most of the time (unless it feels poopy ), bubble tip shown, no injuries, food sticks to it right away and it did not move for weeks now. Also did not decrease in size.
The only reason why I'm thinking it could be bleached is the colour (no "brown" base colour) and the fact that it likes to be underneath an overhang away from the light. Only the very tips get light. The colour has not really changed the last month but then again I too have not taken pictures at the very beginning to compare to now.

I wish I could read minds. Don't want to overfeed this poor bugger but also don't want to starve it.

Are there any visible signs where I could recognize if I do overfeed (as I'm planning to increase small feedings to every two days)?

Oh and thanks for the advice given so far
Delphinus woaw.. huuge

[Quagmire]

Is there any color at all? Or is it pure white? If its always fully extended it may be looking for food,feed small amounts often,like every day.If you over feed in one sitting it will spit it back out later, probably after the lights are out.Other than that you can't realy over feed.But feeding ofter will cause it to grow fast once it gets its color back.I feed my healthy ones every second day.

[Beverly]

One of GBTAs hid under the rock near the back of our 37g semi-cube when we first got it. It was not bleached in any way, though. I was able to feed it very small amounts of mysis every 2-3 days, and it grew.

However, I wasn't happy with it's location, and wondered why it would want to be there with so little light. I kept moving it to the front of the tank, but it always moved either to the side or behind other rocks. So I began experimenting with different powerhead placements. Turns out that the water flow in the front of tank was too strong for the GBTA.

To keep the GBTA in the front of the tank, I rearranged the powerheads so there wouldn't be suc strong flow at the front of the tank. It took awhile to find the right flow. The GBTA moved around at night while I was experimenting with water flow. I made sure there were no powerhead intakes that were potential dangers for the moving GBTA.

Timelapse videos of the GBTA moving around at night....

Our Our GBTA Clone .... one night's journey - PART ONE - December 1 to 2, 2005
(320 x 240 pixels, 2.3 MB, :54 minutes)

Our GBTA Clone .... one night's journey - PART TWO - December 2 to 3, 2005
(320 x 240 pixels, 2.0 MB, :41 minutes)

When we got our RBTA for our 67g, I made sure the water flow was quite low in the location I chose for it. It moved a couple of inches and settled into a rock that it's been in for about a year, even after moving it to our 120g a few months ago.....

Feeding PE Mysis to our RBTA
(320 x 240 pixels, 5.7 MB, 1:28 minutes)

Now, both GTBA and RBTA are together in the 120g. I feed them each 1/4 of a finely chopped scallop once a week. They are doing great....

GBTA and RBTA Vignette
(320 x 240 pixels, 3.6 MB, :45 minutes)

GBTA and RBTA Mingling
320 x 240 pixels, 4.6 MB, :55 minutes)

[Delphinus]

Originally Posted by anglfish

the fact that it likes to be underneath an overhang away from the light. Only the very tips get light.

This is actually a very textbook example of BTA behaviour. They don't like their pedal disks out in the open, exposed to current and light. They will seek out a crevasse, cave or overhang to hang out under, and then "reach out" their tentacles out into the current and light. Sometimes they can reach out so much that the pedal disk looks like a garden hose, all stretched out, weaving through the rockwork to get the oral disk and tentacles out into the open.

I wish I could read minds. Don't want to overfeed this poor bugger but also don't want to starve it.

To be honest, I don't think you can really overfeed OR underfeed a BTA, they tend to be more or less bulletproof. In some situations, in depressed light intensities, they may need to be fed to compensate for the lower energy intake from the zooxanthellae (photosynthesis). I've had BTA's for nearly 10 years now and I've gone from basically daily feedings to not having fed them in months (at least, no "directed target feeding" .. they probably catch food intended for the fish, just fine on their own!) and to be honest I wouldn't say they did better in either situation ..

One thing, increased feeding will lead to increased growth rate, and there seems to be a "maximum size" that they will reach before they may start splitting. At least mine have behaved in this manner. If I feed less, they grow less, and split less. If I feed more, they grow faster and split sooner.

Now .. a couple caveats. I said you can't overfeed, and .. to a degree this isn't "really" true. Where there is some risk is if you feed very large meaty chunks of food. If you feed an anemone something that is too large, it may not be able to digest it fully and it may end up spitting out some half-digested, half-decomposing wad of goo several hours later. There is some risk, I think, that they can get food poisoning (in a sense) from this. I've heard stories on RC where people think they may have fed a "bad piece" of silverside or something and the anemone has gotten ill (for lack of a better way to describe it) and in some cases not recovering.

However, small pieces seem to go down just fine. Nowadays I feed mine mysis and just shoot a turkey baster shot at them. They'll take what they want, and anything they don't want just floats off to be eaten by someone else. If you feed this kind of planktonic-sized food particles (I think mysis is the best food out there for anemones) then it's almost impossible to overdo it (the only risk is if you feed too much you add too many nutrients to your system and you get the usual algae problems and so on).

Are there any visible signs where I could recognize if I do overfeed (as I'm planning to increase small feedings to every two days)?

Hard to describe, but, if you watch your anemones closely you'll learn the signals. The only thing I can think of is watch the poop. If it poops out what you feed a few hours later, try throttling back a little. If it doesn't, you can try feeding a little more next time. It's sort of subjective but you'll start to see when it looks good, or doesn't look as good, and you can go from there.

Hope this helps, and sorry it was so long.

[anglfish]

Originally Posted by Quagmire

Is there any color at all? Or is it pure white? .

it is bright neon pink. sometimes deep deon pink depending on how much it is extended. it is however transparent-ish towards the body. I read that this ANY anomone would have a brown-base colour, so in the case of a RBTA it should be dark non-transparent red-ish.
Of course the LFS said it wasn't bleeched, but....
I knew when I got it that there is a good chance that it it bleeched and that I might get myself into trouble. It looked healthy otherwise so I took the risk.

Thanks Bev for all those videos. Some of them I knew and admired before.
And we all know the infamous BTA POOP video, don't we That was awesome. I actually tried to pull off something similar the other day but don't seem to be as coordinated with it and sucked in a tentacle as well Rosie (BTA) was mad at me after so I won't try that again.

Tony, thanks so much for all this info. I'm quiet reliefed to hear that Rosie's behavior is not as unusual as I thought. Also I'm glad that I can't harm her increasing the feeding. I too read a few threads on RC that sounded rather alarming about Anemones dying due to overfeeding

Thanks again for all your advice. You guys are the best.