Color-dyed anenomes

[Paul Bick]

I recently saw a couple of tube anenomes that that seemed clearly dyed.
One was bright orange and the other kind of a flourescent green/yellow.
Very fake looking. Is this a really widespread thing? How long does
the dye job last? Does it harm the animal?
--paul

[Patty Hankins]

I used to see the dyed anemones in fish stores, usually ones that had the
painted glassfish too.... Haven't seen them in a while (fortunately). It
is my understanding that they usually die fairly rapidly.

Bill

[Wade Norton]

Hmmm, are you sure it was dyed?

The reason I ask, is that my wife and I were diving this last weekend (in
the Puget Sound) and we say "Stubby Rose Anemones" for the first time. They
are beautiful. I didn't know there were anemones with that much color. Make
me want to start a "cold water" aquarium and stock it with local livestock.

wade

--
Wade Norton
wno...@teleport.com
www.teleport.com/~wnorton

Paul Bick wrote in message <3650B850...@ix.netcom.com>...

[Kevin]

Tube anemones (Cerianthids) are normally brightly colored. The pictures you
see at Flying Fish Express, for example, are taken directly from Baensch's
Marine Atlas, Volume 1, a pretty reliable source of info.

--
-EC
E-mail me at: ktom...@rochester.rr.com.com (remove 2nd ".com")

[Craig Bingman]

In article <ya642.1461$Sz4.8...@news.teleport.com>,

Wade Norton <wno...@teleport.com> wrote:
>Hmmm, are you sure it was dyed?
>
>The reason I ask, is that my wife and I were diving this last weekend (in
>the Puget Sound) and we say "Stubby Rose Anemones" for the first time. They
>are beautiful. I didn't know there were anemones with that much color. Make
>me want to start a "cold water" aquarium and stock it with local livestock.

If you have access to back issues (printed version) of Aquarium
Frontiers, Ron Shimek did a really nice article on a "cold water reef"
system. He made the point that although you need to run a big chiller
for such a system, the power requirements for lighting and skimming are
much lower for a cold water tank.

Cold-water inverts can be vividly colored. The fish, however, tend to be
more plain than tropical reef fish.

------------------------

About the tube anemones... they probably weren't dyed. Many have
brilliant color naturally. Be warned, however, that they will eat any
small fish that blunder into their tentacles. They aren't a good choice
for a reef aquarium, although if you wanted to set up a tank featuring
them, it would make a beautiful species tank. I suppose they could also
go into a refugium with a deep sand bed.

Craig

[Dave Sheehy]

Craig wrote:
> If you have access to back issues (printed version) of Aquarium
> Frontiers, Ron Shimek did a really nice article on a "cold water reef"
> system. He made the point that although you need to run a big chiller
> for such a system, the power requirements for lighting and skimming are
> much lower for a cold water tank.

Unless you want to grow algae, then you'll need some decent lighting. A long
time ago in a land far away someone in the group was playing around with a
cold reef and they ended up putting a MH on one end of the tank to get their
algae to grow.

Dave Sheehy