Wax rose
| Wax rose | ||||||||||||
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Wax roses ( Anemonia sulcata ) |
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| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Anemonia sulcata | ||||||||||||
| Pennant , 1777 |
The wax Rose ( Anemonia sulcata , also Anemonia viridis ) is a European species of sea anemones (Actiniaria). It lives in the Mediterranean and on the coast of Western Europe to the English Channel and Scotland , always in flat coastal regions.
features
The wax rose has two different shapes. The smaller one has 70 to 192 tentacles and its foot disk is up to five centimeters in diameter. It lives in large colonies, in very shallow, often strongly agitated water down to a depth of five meters. The larger form reaches a diameter of 15 to 20 centimeters. It has 192 to 384 tentacles and lives solitary to a depth of 25 meters.
Wax roses live in symbiosis with zooxanthellae , which color the tentacle tips of the wax roses green or purple and are also responsible for the production of the wax roses' own neurotoxins, etc. a. ATX-II (Anemonia viridis toxin 2), are responsible. Specimens living in deeper water, on the other hand, are monochrome gray.
Unlike many other sea anemones, wax roses can neither shorten their tentacles nor move into their body.
ecology
Wax roses feed on smaller animals, which they catch with their tentacles equipped with strong nettle cells . Small fish, crustaceans and molluscs have already been found in their gastric space . A number of animals, u. a. the anemone goby ( Gobius bucchichii ), the anemone spider crab ( Inaachus phalangium ) and the hover shrimp Leptomyysis mediterranea live as commensals in wax roses and are immune to their nettle poisons .
literature
- Matthias Bergbauer, Bernd Humberg: What lives in the Mediterranean? , Franckh-Kosmos Verlag, 1999, ISBN 3-440-07733-0
