What's munching on starfish?

Raptor72

Active member
My starfish made his weekly appearance today and I noticed that several of it's limbs look as if they've been chewed on. I don't have any harlequin shrimp. It usually stays buried so I haven't seen what's been doing it. My CUC consists of hermits and nassarius snails. As far as fish, blue hippo tang, yellow tang, clowns, malannarus wrasse, foxface, and pj cardinals. Inverts include fire shrimp and also a tuxedo and long spined urchin.

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I would guess it's probably starving to death. Pretty common that they start falling apart when that happens.
 
like little chunks of shrimp or fish placed under them? Or a big chunk it can gnaw on? How do you keep the fish and crabs from hauling the chow off?? Will it help the linkia's also?
 
Well, starfish don't have teeth to gnaw, so small stuff. Most people try burying it in the sand a little or put it right next to the star. You don't want to just leave a bunch of food laying around in there. Most people aren't successful with supplementing anyway, though, for SS stars.

Since no one knows what linckias actually eat, supplemental feeding won't help there.

Both stars do best in large, well-established tanks.
 
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From your pic, it looks like your starfish is suffering the same fate as virtually all home aquarium starfish...they simply dissolve in saltwater tanks. I read about this phenomena a year or two back in Coral magazine. The jist is that starfish are outrageously sensitive to very slight changes in salinity; the starfish surface you see is very thin, and the starfish itself is basically a sack of carefully controlled osmotic salts that quickly become depleted when the osmostic pressure on the cell walls changes. Salt either rushes out of the starfish when it's unbalanced, or rushes in when its unbalanced, both causing death and dissolving of the starfish. Early on, to save itself, it jettisons an arm in an attempt to stop the loss of its internal fluids.

Linkias really shouldn't be sold in the aquarium trade, along with most all starfish. Despite ato's, humans cannot replicate in a couple hundred gallons of water the exact conditions of the ocean which are amazingly stable to allow starfish to survive. Over time, an inmbalance will inevitably occur and the starfish will die. Of course there are plenty of anecdotes about starfish living years in larger established aquariums; but for every 1 that survives, 1000 dissolve. Good luck though.
 
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