supplements in the water?

hi there, i have a purple tip seabae anemone for about 5 weeks now, she is doing fine and is growing a little bit since we got her, my question is do i need to put special stuff in the water for her, the shop said no, but other people told me i need to put supplements in there, so do i need to and if so what am i suppost to put in, lot's of stuff in the shop, confusing :-/

 

You don't need to put anything in the water for the anemone. You do need to be feeding it though. If you don't, it will slowly starve to death. What do you feed and how often?

 

a tiny piece of silversides every 2 or 3 days

 

Sounds great

 

Hello, after skimming through some articles, here are a couple excerpts;
Nutrition
"Sea anemones that are host to clown fishes, like many tropical actinians and some temperate ones, harbor unicellular algae within the cells of their tentacles and oral disk. A portion of the sugars produced by these plants through photosynthesis are "leaked" to their host. This may be the anemone's major source of energy. The widely flared oral disk of many host actinians serves not only to accommodate fish, but its large surface area is well adapted for intercepting sunlight.
However, actinians, like all coelenterates, capture and digest animal prey with their nematocysts. We have found small fish, sea urchins, and a variety of crustaceans (shrimps and crabs) in the coelenterate of host anemones. They also appear to feed on plankton-like items conveyed by the currents. Although the energy they derive from photosynthesis may be sufficient to live, the anemones need sulfur, nitrogen, and other elements in order to grow and reproduce. These animals are not voracious predators: their prey probably consists of animals that bump into them (e.g. a fish fleeing a more active predator) or stumble over them (e.g. a sea urchin, which has no eyes). Therefore, the supply is probably small and irregular. A more predictable source of these nutrients may be from wastes of their symbiotic fish. This issue deserves to be studied scientifically. Anemones of some species are capable of absorbing nutrients directly from seawater through their thin tissues, and that may be another source of nutrition for these animals as well."
Survival
"Anemones do not need to be fed every other day! In fact most anemones benefit from from being fed much less then you may think. If kept under very bright illumination a healthy anemone does not need to be fed at all! They can get enough nutrition off the symbiotic algae that lives in its tissues and get all the nourishment they need from that. On the other hand an occasional feeding of larger meaty frozen marine food can help to keep the hobbyist(you) more at ease so a feeding once a week is okay. You can actually over feed an anemone and cause a short life span. The piece of food you feed should be no bigger than the mouth located in the center of the animal where there are no tentacles growing. Do not feed every other day! When an anemone eats it must also produce waste. This waste will be exported through the mouth and if it gets fed to often it can cause a toxic situation with in the anemone. It is common for an anemone to deflate shortly after feeding to expel any wastes that have built up and to replace the water(which becomes fouled) in its tissues. An anemone that is constantly deflated due to being over fed can not get the proper lighting to its tissues to keep its symbiotic algae growing and producing nutrients that it can not get from an oral feeding. With out this algae thriving in the tissues the anemone soon becomes weak and stays shriveled up longer and longer and may actually shrink in size. Eventually this will cause the death of your anemone."

Most people who have had good success with Anemones either rarely fed them (directly) or fed them very scarcely (once a month).