3rd Fish MIA in 2 months???

what other fish do you have in the tank? brittle star killing 3 fish is a pretty unlikely culprit...

 

yea compared to fish they are slow as snails

 

I have a 1 Clown, a pj cardinal, a yellow tail damsel, and now only 1 chromis left. I have read from others that they have seen there brittle killing stuff. Take divott for example, he watched his grab 2 shrimp. I guess they get the fish when there sleeping. But the more I read the more I find others with the same problem. I had no fish deaths until I put him in there. For the first 2 months when he was small I had no problems, but since he has exploded in growth and is huge fish keep going missing. I would love it if it wasn't him, because he is a favorite of mine.

 

bait him out

 

Ya the only problem is I have no where to take him. The store I called said he didn't feel comfortable selling it to a costumer if it was going to eat there fish. I guess its good that he cares about his costumers, but it sucks for me. Seem the big fish are safe, only the little ones go missing. So maybe some one with bigger fish would be fine.

 

does your lfs have a seperate tank for corals or where they cure lr ? they could throw him in there. mine got tossed in a shark tank. lol. my lfs keeps a nurse shark, about 4 ft long in their tank. he drifted down to the bottom to the lr there. hes now with some green death stars they have in there.

 

He does have a live rock tank. Maybe he can live out the rest of his life in there??

 

should be enough crud for him there. check it out .

 

Owning a reef tank has it's learning curve and you have seen first hand what can happen when you don't follow the right path. Catch the bristle star and bring him back to the store and just maybe they might give you a small credit or if they don't so what!
I don't mean to be hard on you but man you've got to get him out of there. At least your dealing with a star and not a fish or a mantis shrimp like I have. I can't catch him unless I destroy my 210 gal reef trying. I only wish it was something I could catch. Good luck.

 

I personally think you may be over-reacting. You are operating on an assumption here, I guess you could try throwing the star in the sump for a while but there's no guarantee that if you stop losing fish that it's due to the brittle being out of the tank. It's circumstantial evidence and while it might be a good last resort to rely on I wouldn't go there just yet.

Fish die all the time for mysterious reasons, maybe it's the end of their lifespan, maybe they get outcompeted for food, which can be hard to tell sometimes if they get a little bit of food but not enough to healthy long term, maybe it's some form of disease or your fish are somehow being undernourished, or something else entirely.

With so little information about the tank and it's inhabitants and the overall system I'm surprised so many people are so quick to jump on the star as the potential source of the problem since there is no possible way to actually lay blame with any sort of certainty with the information that's been given in this thread.
As an example of the type of issue it could be (completely made up of course) if there were a group of 5 chromis in the tank (could be, we don't know) they are well known to whittle their groups down through conspecific aggression and losing 3 of them in a couple months would be very common. Blaming it on the star in that type of situation I think would be kind of ridiculous.

More information about your tank inhabitants, what fish actually died, what other fish are still in the tank, what is your feeding schedule and what do you feed, how long were the fish in the tank before they died, did all the fish come from the same source, did you make any changes around the time each one died, what level of filtration do you have etc etc.