LTA behavior, health, systems   2/2/06 Hi guys!    wonderful site, great advice! Like many before me and very unfortunately many after me in July 2005 I made an impulse purchase, I purchased a long tentacle anemone. Everything was fine till about a month ago. Here are parts "article" I wrote for my website (to read it all www.homereefkeeping.com) it will explain my predicament: <Thank you for this> We bought an anemone in July of 2005. We got our Long Tentacle Anemone (LTA with a bright red stock) along with 2 True Percula Clownfish. The first mistake we made was not researching anemones and finding out how to care for them prior to making our purchase. Our second mistake was buying it on impulse. <Very common> It lived in it's cave for a while it would expand and half went from a pale cream color to a 'dusky pink', the other half being sheltered from the bright metal halides stayed the pale cream color. In mid October it moved from the cave to an opening in the rock on the left hand side of the tank. It would expand to the size of a typical dinner plate. We would feed it medium/large sized (about 1/3 of a shrimp) pieces of raw, thawed shrimp every 5 days or so.. It would take the food readily, fold back on itself, and would ingest the food given. The entire anemone turned a healthy 'dusky pink' <Yes... thank goodness energy/food provided by you through feeding... inadequate light response> Today's date is January 28, 2006 and since December (unfortunately I did not keep records, or dates) the anemone had been acting 'strange' for the last month. It would no longer expand fully, it had become difficult to feed, would retract on itself. It hasn't completely lost it's color. <Yes, bleaching...> Approximately 5 days ago the anemone 'fell' through the rocks, for about a day it hid under the rockwork; 3 days ago it moved to the back of the tank where it has been laying on its side. I thought it had died and tried to move it only to find out that it has attached itself solidly onto one of the rocks. For the last 2 days I've been feeding the anemone shrimp (that I put through the blender) and Mysis with a turkey baster. Here's where opinion vary; where I had read to feed the anemone large meaty chunks, on another site it said to feed it small shredded pieces of 'meat'. After a bit of consideration and seeing what we'd been through with our anemone I am most certainly starting to think that the shredded option makes a lot of sense. If you feed pieces of food that are too large the anemone cannot digest them and slowly expels the food. Thus making the anemone slowly starve, and all the while you think you've been feeding it. <Mmm, as long as the food is taken, ingested...> Well we are now Jan 31st, the anemone has gone back under rocks where I can't get to it's mouth, it inflated it's stock huge today and seemed the have some kind of line down the middle, now (4hrs later) it's slowly deflated itself. yesterday I saw its oral cavity and it was huge, much bigger than I'd ever seen it, today I can't see it so I don't know. Because it's under rocks I can't tell for the life of me if it's splitting, dying or just taking me for a ride on a nasty roller coaster (worried it's dying, then it looks "ok" then it disappears) Has anyone ever seen an anemone split? <Oh yes> How does it act before splitting? <Sometimes "out of the ordinary"... often not> what else could be wrong with it? <... a lack of light, circulation, metabolite poisoning, a dearth of biomineral, alkalinity...> I have a 65 gallon tank, 80lbs of Live sand, 120lbs of LR, a galaxy coral, a frogspawn coral, <... Oh, and allelopathy... chemical competition. These animals are problematic in the same water> 2 true Percs, a lawnmower blenny, 2 cleaner shrimp, scarlet crabs, blue legged crabs and an assortment of snails. The shrimp molt almost every 2 weeks. My water parameters are as follows : ammonia: 0, nitrite: 0 nitrate:0 phosphates:0-0.5 (gha prob...) ph: 8.0 to 8.3 depending on the time of day, temp: 79F salinity: 1.025 other than a drop in phosphates the water has been stable since it cycled in May 2005 I have a protein skimmer, 3 powerheads, a PhosBan/ROWAphos fluidizer (long cylindrical thing for active carbon and phosphate remover) up until 3 days ago had a Eheim canister filter (stopped it to see if it was the cause of high phosphates and my phosphates have dropped from 0.5 to 0) Thank you for all your help Catherine <Needs to be in a different system (w/o the Oculinid, Euphylliid) and more light... at least. Bob Fenner>