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Heteractis magnifica, the magnificent sea anemone aka the Ritteri anemone has been the quintessential clownfish hosting anemone in our mind since we first began in the marine aquarium hobby. Although Ritteri anemones are the epitome of a showpiece in the wild, they often times fare very poorly in aquaria, not readily adapting to aquarium life anywhere near as well as their bubble tip or carpet anemone counterparts. The dream of captive raised or aquarium propagated Ritteri anemones have been so far out of reach that no one really talks about it but that’s where Vivid Aquariums comes in with the promise of offering captive “made” clones of their stunning purple and green magnificent sea anemone. 

In their latest educational video, Vivid Aquariums shows how they use a straight up knife (and aragonite cajones) to slice straight through the disc, mouth and attached foot of their long term resident Ritteri anemone, right inside their show tank! Now normally no one would undertake this cutting procedure with a large, fleshy anemone inside of their large display aquarium but in this case, cutting the Ritteri anemone straight through while it still attached to the glass made for an easy and clean cut, and it allowed the anemone minimal stress in handling and moving.

As you can see from the video, two weeks after the cut the Ritteri anemone is still going strong with both halves showing feet strongly attached to the glass and forming and closing their mouths around where they were cut. In a few months Vivid Aquariums hopes to be able to divide both halves once again and if they can repeat this process a couple more times, in the near future they may be able to offer the first “frags” of this well-established aquarium Ritteri anemone to their customers. No doubt Vivid Aquariums probably already has a long waiting list for slices of their stunning Ritteri anemone but it’s really good to know that this sort of propagation is possible with one of the most highly desired aquarium anemones of all time.