Corallimorphs And Live Food

[Donya]

More strange corallimorph stuff...these being the little pink guys I've posted about before (as opposed to ricordea, etc.): http/img.photobucket.com/albums/v281/kwippo/coralis1.jpg

My main population of them used to be in my 5 gallon where they were eating live isopods on a regular basis. Since moving them to my 1 gallon, I've noticed that they will stop accepting frozen foods over time (they stop "catching" it and just let it wash over them) unless periodically fed something live. I use brine shrimp, even though I know they have little/no nutritional value...but it seems to elicit certain feeding responses that I don't get otherwise, and then they are happy to take frozen stuff later. The key seems to be the initial stimulus of something wiggling around, which of course I can't do with frozen foods because the corallimorphs are too small.

Is this a behavior pattern that occurs commonly in any other corals/anemones? I havn't read about it and had always just assumed that most of these guys were fairly passive feeders, not carying whether what they caught was wiggling or not.

 

[SkiFletch]

Huh, wierd. I've never heard of that with larger nems (carpets, BTAs, LTAs, etc). They'll eat whole dead fish

 

[Lynden]

I need to get me some of those things So different from other anemones.

-Lynden

 

[Donya]

Huh, wierd. I've never heard of that with larger nems (carpets, BTAs, LTAs, etc). They'll eat whole dead fish

Will those guys actively catch live fish given the opportunity?

(Edited for abominable typos)

 

[Opcn]

They most certainly will.

Live food almost always seems to work better, just about everything thats not a scavenger has adapted to respond to eat things that are alive, in the wild a corallimorph is unlikely to encounter a dead mysis shrimp, so its not tasteing for dead mysis shrimp, life animals and dead animals give off different chemicals and obviously have different behavior.

 

[SkiFletch]

Yeah, nems will catch full size fish if given the opportunity, both in the wild and in tanks.