Batik Starfish

I remember seeing that star on saltwaterfish.com and it is not reef safe...

 

Does anybody have any idea what that starfish eats? If not, it may very well starve to death in your tank/sump.

 

Its same body shape as the chocolate chip, would lead me to try half green mussels or other shell fish halved

 

Does body shape determine diet? I ask because this is the first time I've heard this and I'm not too up to date on starfish info.

 

The reading I have done suggests that a starfishes form more than shape indicates its diet to some degree - the longer thinner armed species being designed for sifting and utilising small food stuffs and the bigger bodied/ fatter armed species being designed to be able to pry open bivalves and digest thereafter - the wider body allows them to encompass larger food stuffs

information on Batik speciesis not abundant as I also looked for specific details to help so as to whether this species has a particular dietery requirement I am unable to say for certain

but Id try the bivalves, deep frozen, halfed, thawed and then dropped in vicinity ( easier to split 50/50 while still frozen, with a blunt food knife)

 

Echinoderms (starfish, brittle star, sea urchin, feather star, sea cucumber)

good site indicating behaviour and diet of different star fish species

 

Mine eats fine actually. For the first 1-2 months that I had it, it would just eat algae off the tank walls and seemed content. One day I tried giving it a silverside while I was feeding my nem just to see what happened. It was snacking on it for a few hours before it finished it. Now I feed it two silversides a week.

 

excellent , do you have any corals in the same tank?
I only mention this because when I had my tank set up as a FOWLR - I had 1 chocolate chip star fish ( its my avatar) and when I converted to reef set up (WIP) I overlooked it for a couple of weeks until one day I saw him on my GSP colony which now has a bald spot where the star fishes stomach had ingested the polyps

 

No, no corals right now. I just have the 3 nems, which was my concern when I started this thread. So far I have been lucky. It seems that as long as a ifeed him a few times is not hungry enough to go after the nems. Hope this holds true.