Carpet Anemone

[RNall]

:angry How dare you remind me of that! I hadn't stressed over that in a day or so! THanks a lot!

:lol

The rewards of parenting 5 kids is far more worthwhile than this hobby. Well, except when they almost burn, flood and destroy the house. Sometimes good kids make bad decisions...Sometimes good kids make bad decisions....Sometimes good kids make bad decisions...oh, sorry, just reminding myself.

Last night my wife and I had our first kid free evening in months. Would you believe that we went to a meeting on becoming foster parents. Something is seriously wrong with us. :lol

Oh, the college thing is a breeze. All I have to do is win the lottery and its a non-issue. Which reminds me, I've never bought a ticket in my life, I better get moving on my college plan. (just kidding)

This is not 100% off topic. My wife called to say that the anemone is looking 100%.

[matt]

90% of wild caught host anemones die in aquariums within a few months, and that's only counting the ones that make to the retail store alive; I don't know what percentage die between collection and retail, but I bet it's very high. Also, every host anemone taken out of the ocean means a loss of clownfish habitat and almost always the death of the clowns that were living in the anemone, according to every published book I've seen on the subject. This, unfortunately, does mean that any purchase of a wild caught host anemone has a negative environmental impact. Even if you are one of the very few that can keep carpet anemones alive, buyng one means the store will order another, and so forth. Does that make it irresponsible? In my opinion, yep. Of course, we've all made irresponsible purchases in this hobby, so I'm not trying to slam anyone. For example, Ron Shimek has written exactly about this, but then he also writes about the S. haddoni anemone he keeps, and a book about keeping host anemones in general. So it's entirely a different question about what's "wrong" to buy or keep in aquariums, but when you look at the statistics it's really hard to support the idea of taking these animals from the wild. Tank bred E. quadricolor (BTA) are so successful that it seems crazy not to go that route.