Great article! Very informative. You learn something new every day in this hobby.
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Bleached anemone or corals, if partial bleached will return with out transplant. This is true if the the coral or anemone sill have a few, or even 1 or 2, that is not visible. However, If they truly completely bleached, they will have to get the zooxanthellae from and external source.
If I have to proof that this procedure works, all I have to do is keep the anemone in a good, but basically sterile environment to do the transplant. Perhaps put a strong UV sterilizer on the tank. Do the transplant and show that the zooxanthellae return in 10-14 days.
To have enough bleached anemones to do two arm randomized trial is not practical, nor the reward of doing this study is enough to entice anybody to do it.
I keep anemone for a very long time now. Before doing this procedure I had anemone that stay bleached for many months, until they died. I still have picture of a rose BTA back in 1997 that was bleached and died on me after many months. I think I will try to find it and attach it here later.
Doing the procedure, my bleached anemones will regain the zooxanthellae without fail within 14 days. That is all except 1 time, and I learned quite a bit from that failure.
To me, this is just logical and straight forward. An illness that we do know what happened, and a very easy, simple way to correct it. We certainly don't have to do a control experiment to know that jumping out of a building from 4th floor will almost always result in death, while jumping from the same height into a rescue net, almost always result in a live person.
Cheer.