feather duster dead?
- Thread starter dkritz
- Start date
They drop their crowns when they are stressed. Keep on top of your water quality and it may grow a new one.
Oh dear lord -- this means that there are a lot of people here with starving feather dusters.
Feather dusters jettison their "crowns" when they get stressed or starving -- and if they are starving you know they are stressed.
What happens when they jettison their crowns is that the larger crowns are designed to catch larger particles of food (like copepods, invertebrate larvae, rotifers, etc) and when they find that they are not catching anything with a crown "tuned" to the larger particles, they throw it away and grow a smaller one to catch the next size of food down.
What you generally find with marine inverts is that they will try to spawn when they think they are dying as a last-ditch effort to preserve the species. So each time your feather duster thinks it's about dead, it spawns on the remote, remote chance that it might somehow grow a new one somewhere. So if you have a group of dying feather dusters, in an area that no longer has food, and then even though they can't move, their spawn might settle down in a different part of the ocean with more food and continue the species.
So to keep the larger feather dusters it's imperative that you start putting large amounts of phyto such as DT's into the water in order to keep it from starving to death. I had a Hawaiian feather duster (with a beautiful 2" crown) and I would turn the water green with DTs in my 6 gallon tank, and it would totally clear the tank of phyto in about 2 hours or so.
You should see the feather duster "pooping" out packets of food from the center of it's crown (they absorb food from underneath the crown, and eject food from the center of the crown and let the current carry it away). If you don't see the feather duster pooping stuff out, it's not eating anything. They will grab food from current that comes from behind them, digest it, and create little cylindrical "poop packets" and let thet them float off into the current.
When my feather duster was not eating anything, it would get really nervous and not open up much at all, and would retreat quickly at any sound -- when I was feeding it DTs, it would stay open happily, and even if I slammed the cover of the tank by accident, it wouldn't flinch. If it was starving, it would get pretty "flighty".
I tried feeding the feather duster dried spirulina, but it wouldn't eat it -- it would capture the spirulina, but then reject it in mucousy streams that would flow from its feathers. I bought some "reef nutrition" phyto that advertises itself as being live, but is really dead (you can see on the bottle that it is preserved with citric acid, it's one of the ingredients) and that was inedible to the feather duster -- he always hid whenever I added it to the tank.
After trying to feed the feather duster the reef nutrition phyto, I went on vacation for a week and when I came back, it was almost dead from starvation.
Here's a link for help on the critters at saltcorner.com (it's an article by Rob Toonen) on how to help care for your feather duster:
http://www.saltcorner.com/sections/guest/toonen/QA_FeatherDusters.html
Make sure that feather duster is eating! The tiny feather dusters can live on stuff that naturally grows in the tank, but the big ones need a lot more food, and will starve to death if you do not specifically feed them. They will regrow crowns, but it's a sign that the thing is starving to death.
Feather dusters jettison their "crowns" when they get stressed or starving -- and if they are starving you know they are stressed.
What happens when they jettison their crowns is that the larger crowns are designed to catch larger particles of food (like copepods, invertebrate larvae, rotifers, etc) and when they find that they are not catching anything with a crown "tuned" to the larger particles, they throw it away and grow a smaller one to catch the next size of food down.
What you generally find with marine inverts is that they will try to spawn when they think they are dying as a last-ditch effort to preserve the species. So each time your feather duster thinks it's about dead, it spawns on the remote, remote chance that it might somehow grow a new one somewhere. So if you have a group of dying feather dusters, in an area that no longer has food, and then even though they can't move, their spawn might settle down in a different part of the ocean with more food and continue the species.
So to keep the larger feather dusters it's imperative that you start putting large amounts of phyto such as DT's into the water in order to keep it from starving to death. I had a Hawaiian feather duster (with a beautiful 2" crown) and I would turn the water green with DTs in my 6 gallon tank, and it would totally clear the tank of phyto in about 2 hours or so.
You should see the feather duster "pooping" out packets of food from the center of it's crown (they absorb food from underneath the crown, and eject food from the center of the crown and let the current carry it away). If you don't see the feather duster pooping stuff out, it's not eating anything. They will grab food from current that comes from behind them, digest it, and create little cylindrical "poop packets" and let thet them float off into the current.
When my feather duster was not eating anything, it would get really nervous and not open up much at all, and would retreat quickly at any sound -- when I was feeding it DTs, it would stay open happily, and even if I slammed the cover of the tank by accident, it wouldn't flinch. If it was starving, it would get pretty "flighty".
I tried feeding the feather duster dried spirulina, but it wouldn't eat it -- it would capture the spirulina, but then reject it in mucousy streams that would flow from its feathers. I bought some "reef nutrition" phyto that advertises itself as being live, but is really dead (you can see on the bottle that it is preserved with citric acid, it's one of the ingredients) and that was inedible to the feather duster -- he always hid whenever I added it to the tank.
After trying to feed the feather duster the reef nutrition phyto, I went on vacation for a week and when I came back, it was almost dead from starvation.
Here's a link for help on the critters at saltcorner.com (it's an article by Rob Toonen) on how to help care for your feather duster:
http://www.saltcorner.com/sections/guest/toonen/QA_FeatherDusters.html
Make sure that feather duster is eating! The tiny feather dusters can live on stuff that naturally grows in the tank, but the big ones need a lot more food, and will starve to death if you do not specifically feed them. They will regrow crowns, but it's a sign that the thing is starving to death.
