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Coral Vue Hydros

A seastar suddenly appears


EarleD

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I’m setting up a Fluval V. It’s been running for about 4 days. I seeded with caribsea live sand and about 5-6 pieces of base rock and one piece from the stores reef tanks

 

last night a seastar crawled out of the rock.  It’s ugly and good sized.  
 

any thoughts?

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Looks like some sort of linkia, if I had to hazard a guess. 🤔

 

Sea stars in general have very poor survival rates in home reeftanks, especially nano-sized ones. Any chance you can return it to the store somehow? 

 

It's a cool hitchiker, but it won't last, unfortunately. 😔

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No i just started the tank and the lfs is salt/reef friendly.   He gave me the rock to seed the tank. 
 

I’ll  grab it next time I see it.  Seems to have a favorite hole in the rock.  
 

was hoping it would live in the sand bed and stir the sand.  Oh well thanks everyone 

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1 hour ago, EarleD said:

was hoping it would live in the sand bed and stir the sand.  Oh well thanks everyone 

Starfish are just notorious difficult to feed (excluding asterina starfish that is often considered a pest). They often have specific want that make them pets for expert aquarist.

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There is a starfish with a similar coloration (but very different texture/shape) that lives in the sand and eats things in it, but generally speaking, it's challenging to keep them in even very large tanks because they will vacuum up almost everything in the sand bed, even clean up crew members, and then run out of food because of how quickly they eat and how large they can get.

I agree that the overall shape seems closest to a linkia star, and they have a similar diet to a lot of starfish - bivalves.  If you want to try to keep it, maybe finding some small clams or mussels would be something to try... but just in eating that could produce enough waste to foul the water relatively quickly, these kinds of starfish can get decently large.

 

At the very least, I would hold off on adding any clams you want to keep until you can ID it, get it eating, or get it out.

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Got him out.  He had died.  same rock also had a button polyp grow out of it.  Plain brown and small. 👍
 

added 3 scarlet hermits for the start of a cuc. 

LFS tested my water and told me no nh3. Low nitrites and some nitrates.   Getting there.  

patience is the key now.  

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