Bta's What's With The Bubbles.
Over the last 14 months my green BTA has split and split,. I now have 7 clones in the tank plus a genetically different BTA that I was nursing (successfully) back from bleaching and shrinking to almost nothing. In fact the reason I got the first green BTA was to test the theory of zooxanthellae transferring from one anemone to another. Anyway that's not what this post is about. I'll record how we successfully brought the test nem back in the near future.
Over the years I've seen dozens of posts asking why BTA's do or don't bubble up. Because my nems spread out fairly evenly through the tank, I accidentally had the makings of an experiment. Average flow in my tank is approx 10,000 litres per hour and Initially the nems rarely bubbled up at all.
All my power-heads, return pumps and skimmer run off a remote control powerboard, it makes it easy to kill the flow for target feeding, cleaning, etc. I can only assume this all started because one of the kids accidentlaly sat on the remote control, anyway I walked into the room for the first time that day to see that all flow was off and had probably been off for 7 hours. All the nems were in various states of inflating their bubbles.
So I set up four powerheads and the return pump (return is to RHS of tank) on timers so that only one was on at a time, moving left to right across the tank, with each powerhead on for four hours at a time in left to right sequence with the return off. Then all the units incuding the return operating from midnight until 8am to stir everything up again.
This is not scientifically sound enough to draw any real conclusions and there was no control test. But it did appear that as flow increased near each nem it deflated, as flow moved away it inflated again. Just a thought to keep in mind, as I say there's no real proof of anything.
One day in the future I might set up a series of holding tanks similar to those horrible things most LFS keep siamese fighting fish in. If each compartment has its own flow without effecting the others, they all share a common water pool and a common strip light, it might work. It will have to wait until one of the kids moves out though because I would want to do this in a room without any external light entering the room. One cell (the control) would have constant flow with all others having different flow rates. Observing the results may shed further light on BTA behavior.
It's just an idea I wanted to throw out there. If anyone wants to try this experiment also, please let me know how you go.
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Over the years I've seen dozens of posts asking why BTA's do or don't bubble up. Because my nems spread out fairly evenly through the tank, I accidentally had the makings of an experiment. Average flow in my tank is approx 10,000 litres per hour and Initially the nems rarely bubbled up at all.
All my power-heads, return pumps and skimmer run off a remote control powerboard, it makes it easy to kill the flow for target feeding, cleaning, etc. I can only assume this all started because one of the kids accidentlaly sat on the remote control, anyway I walked into the room for the first time that day to see that all flow was off and had probably been off for 7 hours. All the nems were in various states of inflating their bubbles.
So I set up four powerheads and the return pump (return is to RHS of tank) on timers so that only one was on at a time, moving left to right across the tank, with each powerhead on for four hours at a time in left to right sequence with the return off. Then all the units incuding the return operating from midnight until 8am to stir everything up again.
This is not scientifically sound enough to draw any real conclusions and there was no control test. But it did appear that as flow increased near each nem it deflated, as flow moved away it inflated again. Just a thought to keep in mind, as I say there's no real proof of anything.
One day in the future I might set up a series of holding tanks similar to those horrible things most LFS keep siamese fighting fish in. If each compartment has its own flow without effecting the others, they all share a common water pool and a common strip light, it might work. It will have to wait until one of the kids moves out though because I would want to do this in a room without any external light entering the room. One cell (the control) would have constant flow with all others having different flow rates. Observing the results may shed further light on BTA behavior.
It's just an idea I wanted to throw out there. If anyone wants to try this experiment also, please let me know how you go.
