Leather anemone
| Leather anemone | ||||||||||||
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Leather anemone with Amphiprion bicinctus |
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| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Heteractis crispa | ||||||||||||
| ( Ehrenberg , 1834) |
The leather anemone ( Heteractis crispa ) is a sea anemone from the tropical coral reefs of the Indo-Pacific and the Red Sea .
features
Leather anemones have a leathery gray body, spotted yellow in the lower part, which is covered with sticky warts. The mouth disc is gray, brown-purple or light green. The numerous tentacles (maximum 800) are up to ten centimeters long, are often twisted and taper to the mauve, blue, more rarely yellow or green tips. Your mouth disk usually reaches a diameter of 20 centimeters, but can be up to half a meter in size. They live mainly on sediment, more rarely directly in the coral reef, dig their feet deep into the sand and withdraw completely into the substrate in case of danger. Leather anemones live in symbiosis with zooxanthellae , from which they get some of the nutrients they need.
Leather anemones are symbiotic anemones and important symbiotic partners of the anemonefish . They accept a total of 14 species of anemonefish and, in its youth, the triangular Prussian fish ( Dascyllus trimaculatus ) as partners. If there is no fish as a symbiotic partner, the tentacles are often shortened.
The leather anemone is difficult to keep in a saltwater aquarium .
literature
- Daphne G. Fautin, Gerald R. Allen : Anemonefish and their hosts , Tetra-Verlag (1994), ISBN 3-89356-171-4
