Red Feather Starfish swimming action.

[RockBox13]

From the SPS section of my frag system is where they did best. My system regularly produced live mysis shrimp, and plenty of clean up crew that would spawn on a regular basis. Red Banded Trochus can really get a spawn party started, the mini brittle stars come out of hiding and raise their bodies to cast their little puff of spawn and water can get pretty cloudy. Meanwhile everyone who filter feeds is having a dramatic feeding response. A reef system shouldn’t support just keeping things alive, but an entire food web with livestock attempting to reproduce themselves regularly. If you’ve never seen Tangs or Flasher Wrasse do their spawning in the evening, it’s a beautiful, twisting, flash of lightning and color.

 

[IKD]

Very cool! How long have you had this starfish?

 

[GlassMunky]

Def best left in the oceans.

 

[RockBox13]

Very cool! How long have you had this starfish?

This was back around 2010-2012. I do always stress that I would never order one or encourage anyone who isn’t conducting purposeful scientific research to try and keep one. I thought that I had put that information in the first post, but I did not. The 3 that I have attempted were already imported and placed in wholesaler’s tanks and already doomed. With the system that I had, the number of different foods in different particle sizes available to me, the frequency I fed SPS, live phytoplankton, baby brine and rotifers. This is the 2nd one I kept and it lasted about 4 months and took a nose dive overnight. Not a slow decline. All 3 were overnight deaths, not a lot of losing feathers or arms. The 3rd went about 6 months, but I couldn’t say it was because of water quality or feeding or anything I could see connections to. The first went around 5-6 weeks. They could look a little droopy sometimes and then be fine later. It did seem like they retreated to an area of low flow when they died.

 

[RockBox13]

Def best left in the oceans.

I agree, I would never want to cause one to be taken from the ocean. It was more of an attempt to remove them from the wholesalers tanks and into mine where I knew they would be fed 4-5 times a day 6 days out of the week. I remember when the story was similar for Goniopora/Alveopora. It was always a matter of weeks or months and then somehow the tide turned and now the colors I’ve seen from First Choice Aquatics have been so rich and vibrant. Yellows and Blues I had never seen before. I thought that I had included my cautionary note. I wanted to mention that these feather stars were about 6-7 ft away from 2ft long Grouper intended for the restaurant industry as well.