Mini Carpets Spawning

[dshnarw]

I was up a bit late last night, and noticed my tank clouding up. Turns out, I had a substantial spawning event in the mini carpet garden of my 60g. At least 2 males (a large blue one and a large pink one) continued for about an hour, followed directly by at least 3 females (a blue/green, rainbow, and red/tan) for half an hour or so. Quite literally thousands of tiny eggs floating around the tank.

 

Short videos here: http://s1191.photobucket.com/albums/z471/danielhawkinsphotography/60%20Cube/Spawning/

 

Sorry about the bad quality...still waiting on that camera with video upgrade, so I was attempting to use the phone in low light.

 

 

So the bigger question here is...anyone have a clue on raising anemone larvae for when this happens again?

[collegeman]

One night i noticed my maxi anemones spawning. It was amazing but i did not attempt researching how to raise them.

[Chad]

pretty cool! good luck, perhaps this is at least a start MOFIB

[OUsnakebyte]

First thing - AWESOME! Gotta love that sexual reproduction in the aquarium. Next we need to learn how to predict it - other than when many anemones start spawning, others will typically follow suit.

 

For larval rearing, I have been meaning to post information related to this for some time, so thanks for making me get on it...

 

Ideally, you would concentrate sperm from various males and place eggs in with that to do your fertilizations. Since most ex situ reproduction happens without proper warning or prediction, the best you can usually hope for is nature to take its course in yout tank. This is what happened to me last May 2010 when, on three separate occasions in the span of about 10 days, I had two species of Pacific Nowthwest anemones - U. columbiana and U. crassicornis - spawn, releasing TONS of gametes into the water, and instead of flushing them, I gave it the 'ol college try and applied the same coral larvae rearing techniques to the anemone gametes/larvae. Long story short, I still have baby anemones almost a year later, but dang do they ever grow slowly... Here is what I did:

 

Came in to work, and the tank looked like this, so I shut off all the pumps, air and dump bucket:

 

 

 

 

With various clumps of eggs looking like this:

 

 

 

And dispersed like this:

 

 

 

Males were still releasing sperm:

 

 

 

And you could squeeze the females and thousands of eggs would spew out:

 

 

 

I was able to remove some to concentrate gametes:

 

 

 

 

I used a turkey baster to siphon out concentrated sperm from from some males and put it in a vial, to which I added eggs:

 

 

I let these sit for an hour or two, then rinsed the eggs with fresh sea water to rinse off any dead or dying sperm. I did, however, put the eggs/embryos back into the vial to keep them separate.

 

 

Then, I just started skimming eggs/hopefully fertilized eggs off the top of the water.

 

This is getting too long for one post, so I'm going to have to break it up into multiple posts - sorry. More to come.

 

Cheers

Mike

[dshnarw]

One night i noticed my maxi anemones spawning. It was amazing but i did not attempt researching how to raise them.

 

It seems fairly common now for tapetum, but I haven't seen anyone attempt to keep the eggs yet. I had been planning this as a long-term project, wasn't prepared for them to go crazy quite this quickly (the females have only been in the tank for 5 days).

 

 

Thanks, Chad. I'll see what info I can dig up there.

 

 

Thanks, Mike! I was hoping you'd come along and have some advice since you've done this before. Look forward to the rest of your write up!

[OUsnakebyte]

I should add that I let the eggs and sperm sit for an hour or more in the tank, hoping to increase chances for fertilization. Then, I started skimming eggs off the top:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is where it gets labor intensive. The membranes tend to tear easily for the first 12-18 hours, or so it seems. After that, you can add gentle aeration. You can rear them in a static bin - just water, no bubbling, but you will need to stir them every hour or so. Or, more easily, you can add them to a home-made kreisel to make maintenance easier. Either way, try to keep the developing embryos from clumping together. When they clump/bind, you tend to get very high mortality.

 

 

Static bin - you can add aeration to this later:

 

 

 

Kreisel - small water jets stir water in a circle with a pump:

 

 

 

A low power stereo scope is VERY useful to monitor fertilization rates. Here is a shot under the scope showing various cell division:

 

 

 

Here is a shot from the morning after of those that I kept in the 50 mL vial over night. You can see by the fold how much they clumped:

 

 

 

And then a shot after, under the scope. You can see how bad the membranes look from the binding:

 

 

 

Then... I just waited. Depending on species, they will fall from the water column in a few days and start crawling around looking for a place to metamorphose. Mine all settled on the bottom and sides of the glass tanks and kreisel I had them in. I find anemones easier to deal with than stony corals b/c they can be moved post-metamorphosis.

 

 

 

 

Here is a two-headed one (maybe from fusion...?)

 

 

 

Here is a look at the U. columbiana (pink) three months later:

 

 

 

More on zoox and feeding later - gotta get back to work.

 

Cheers

Mike

[Coral Hind]

Very cool dshnarw!

 

Tagging along to hear the rest of both stories.

[dshnarw]

A few observations from the spawning events:

 

The first spawning that we noticed was April 18th by only the large blue male in one of the videos I posted.

 

The next spawning event was the one April 25th that resulted in this thread, 2 large males, 3 females. 2 of the 3 females were not in the tank at the time of the first spawning event (added 2 days later), so it seems that they have no issue with settling in disrupting the "mood".

 

Last night (April 26th), the same blue male was spawning again by himself, although a very weak effort. Based on the one event I've seen with the females, I think a couple of females were interested, but never released any eggs.

 

Each spawning event has started about an hour after the lights go out. Though I have no long-term predictor for spawning events, I think I can predict whether a spawning event will occur within 10 minutes of the lights going out (my chair is within 2 feet of the mini carpet garden, so there's no lack of observation). At that time, the mini carpets usually shrink up a bit and fold over themselves for the night. Each time the blue mini carpet spawns, he stretches out to full size and makes nearly a perfect disk shape - to the point of pushing the anemones next to him out of the way - and stays in roughly that position through spawning. The other male and the females I observed had similar reactions pre-spawning. The males are very obvious when they are ready to spawn - the oral disk becomes cone-shaped like a volcano well before spawning actually occurs. The females are less noticeable, essentially just puckering their lips.

[OUsnakebyte]

Are the males easily removable? As in, are they attached to rubble that can be taken out and placed into a small bowl so you can concentrate the sperm? In corals, with a few exceptions, proper sperm concentration in water will look about like "lemonade." (Think about that next time you have some Country Time... ). If you can remove the males, as soon as you see them start to spawn, try to remove him/them to the bowls. I would assume that you want a little to go into the tank for chemical communication, but you don't want to lose/dilute the sperm too much.

 

If you can easily remove females, then remove them to their respective bowls once they start releasing eggs. This will just make it easier to collect the eggs. Then, you can start skimming/pipetting eggs and placing them in with the sperm. Try to get as little excess water as possible - remember, it's easier to dilute sperm concentration than it is to increase it. Leave them in the sperm for about 1-2 hours. That should be plenty of time for fertilization. It's nice to have new salt water on hand, b/c you will need to rinse the excess sperm from the embryos. Do this about 4-5 times in a separate vial/bowl. Then, transfer your larvae to a holding tank/kreisel. Pipettes are worth their weight in gold here.

 

If you cannot remove the adults, then you'll just have to hope fertilization can happen in the tank volume. I would turn off all pumps and powerheads to keep the eggs from getting torn up. Hopefully they are positively buoyant??? That will make them easier to skim off the surface and transfer to holding.

 

Now, assuming you get metamorphosis and settlement... zoox uptake... I've never worked with these guys, so I don't know if the females donate zoox to the eggs or not - I'm guessing the literature won't tell us much either. But, it's worth a shot if you want to 'google scholar' the subject. Again, having a dissecting scope here will not only help you determine fertilizations rates/watch developing larvae, but it will allow you to see if settlers have zoox. Oh, I would probably add some small rock rubble to see if they will settle on that vs the glass. But again, they are anemones, so you can move them if needed.

 

What you can do if they don't have zoox is two things - use water for water changes from your display in hopes that there is zoox in that, AND I would also snip off a few tentacles from several adults, grind them up, and distribute the contents to the settlement tank of the larvae. Hopefully they will get some from that too.

 

Feeding - anythig small enough to fit in their mouths. I used newly-hatched, enriched brine shrimp that I have decapsulated first. I highly recommend decapsulated brine, since anemones and corals will still readily take eggs in which the cyst has been removed. The photos above - especially the two-headed anemone(s) have baby brine in their gastrovascular cavities. Also, live or frozen rotifers are good too. Once they get big enough, I started feeding them frozen mysis.

 

Good luck - this is an exciting project!

 

Cheers

Mike

Edited April 28, 2011 by OUsnakebyte

[dshnarw]

Thanks again, Mike!

 

I will definitely be moving the anemones as they spawn (all of them are in a rubble pile on the sand for easy moving anyway). Seems like a much better plan than trying to play catch in the display, though the eggs are slightly positively buoyant. I've got water mixed, containers, and pipettes, as well as a pile of rubble at the ready. I think for at least the first attempt I'm going to use the static bin approach to avoid having a Kreisel project to go with the new tank and mini carpet hatching projects. Hopefully the dissecting scope (been meaning to get one for a while now) will arrive in time, and I'll have baby brine ready to go. Maybe I'm overly confident on fertilization and my ability to wake up constantly to stir the tank, but I think the first feedings are my greatest concern right now.

 

I ran through Google Scholar and the UMaryland databases (thanks to them for not turning off my account as they should have!) and turned up nothing on zooxanthellae uptake, as you suspected.

 

I'll have updates as soon as something happens. I saw a report on RC that they spawned on a weekly basis for one guy, so hopefully I won't have missed my only opportunity.

[dshnarw]

28 days later...

 

A new spawning cycle seems to have started. Unfortunately, the timing looks like it won't work out this time to collect eggs since we're about to go on vacation...so here's hoping for June 20th.

[dshnarw]

also, better video of one of the males:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44wiGWnE6mU

[FearTheTerps]

neat video. loved the lightning, I've never seen any lights do that before.

[OUsnakebyte]

28 days later...

 

A new spawning cycle seems to have started. Unfortunately, the timing looks like it won't work out this time to collect eggs since we're about to go on vacation...so here's hoping for June 20th.

 

Those pesky, brainless invertebrates never seem to pay attention to our schedules, do they...?

[lowsingle]

Excellent write up guys...... good pics and video.........it's always nice to see sexual reproduction in this hobby.......hopefully as time goes on we will see more of it.

 

cheers,

Darren