Meet our newest aquarium addition!
Anemones eat small fish and shrimp. Be glad you're not a little fish stuck in an aquarium with a hungry anemone: each tentacle contains a harpoon-like structure that injects a toxin into the anemone's prey. But then again: be glad you're not an anemone stuck inside a salt-water aquarium devoid of any small fish or shrimp. Our anemone looks like a tube dwelling anemone, found here, but don't quote us on that. A couple of weeks ago the water we added to the tank contained jellyfish larvae, which proceeded to grow into baby jellyfish. They got about a centimeter big and then disappeared. Maybe anemones eat jellyfish? Here are some of our baby jellies, stuck to the wall of the aquarium:
Cool! Thanks Zeb. The only anemones we see with any frequency in the intertidal region are little greens… but occasionally we’ll see big red anemones (which we think are plumose anemones). Who knows what these larvae are, though, because we pump live seawater up to flow-through our wet storage tanks, and use a little bit of it on occasion to top off the aquarium.
Those are not baby jellyfish, but larval anemones… I make my own saltwater and recently noticed the same creatures swimming around in my tank. They can detach from the glass at will. Your filter probably sucked them up. Mine are about 3 mm across now. Not sure if they came from my adult bubble anemone or my rock anemone?
[…] You can see it dwarfs one of our little green anemones. […]