In summary: I'm working on making genetically modified Aiptasia to help understand coral bleaching in more detail. Hopefully this understanding will help researchers come up with ways to limit the impending loss of most of the world's coral reefs.
In more detail:
I'm studying cnidarian-symbiodinium (endosymbiotic algae) symbiosis using Aiptasia pallida as a model organism in Professor John Pringle's lab at Stanford University. Aiptasia has potential to be a good model organism for all the reasons that it is a pest in our tanks: it's hard to kill, easy to grow, tolerates sub-optimal conditions, and grows quickly. Plus, we can treat the anemones with antibiotics to "cure" them of their algal symbionts (AKA bleach them) and they can still survive by feeding. We're developing tools to do genetics research in Aiptasia, with the goal to manipulate various genes in their genome and observe how these manipulations affect symbiosis. One of the major limitations to our work currently is that we cannot "close" the Aiptasia life cycle: we can get males and females to spawn, and we can keep the anemone larvae alive for over a month, but we cannot get the larvae to settle and metamorphose into adult anemones. If anyone has any ideas on this, I'd love to hear them!
We keep a decent stock of anemones for our work, and they are constantly throwing off pedal lacerate clones that we normally just throw in the trash. The way I see it, why not feed them to Berghia nudis instead? I'm new to the lab, and my labmates have two non-research aquaria in desperate need of my attention. As you might expect, both are overrun with Aiptasia and I think Berghia nudis will be a good solution for the smaller tank that contains no predators (just a lone clownfish and some softies). As for breeding potential, we maintain the anemones in plastic tubs on racks hooked up to a manifold. The flow is very low and there is no substrate or rock. I'm sure I could set up a separate tub, toss in all the spare Aiptasia anemones, and throw in some nudis. Hopefully they'd breed in there. Thoughts?