Linkia arm chewed off....whodunit?

I have 2 small clowns (A. polymnus), a small coral banded shrimp, and various snails/hermit crabs. I woke up just now and somhing chewed an arm off my figgin starfish...ahhhhh!(i know he'll regenerate, if he isnt attacked anymore) I suspect it to be the coral banded as he seems to be rather bold about feeding and his little rock...but he is tiny...less than 2". I just want to hear others thoughts on this delema...thanks.

 

couple questions:

How long have you owned it?

Are you sure it didn't fall off? The loss of an arm is hard to determin, a chewed arm looks the same as a arm fallin/fallen off. Stars loose arms due to many conditions, mainly poor acclimation thru out the COC (chain of custody). Even if you and the LFS did 24 hours drips, if the wholesale didn't acclimate, or the collectors left the stars in a bucket too long, or they're was a heat spike in shipping, etc, nothing you or your LFS did will help.

What's your parameters on your tank? Low calcium intake can lad to loss of an arm as well.

Could be the CBS, I've seen them do worse.

FWIW, my parameters are great right now, and my orange linkia lost a tip on his arm just last week. I've had him for over a year now. No CBS or any other critters that would harm my star reside in my tank.

 

My parameters are in check and the star didnt go through a wholesaler (unless theres one above our saler which i doubt due to the prices) as i literally removed it from the back of a truck @ the warehouse and brought it home after a 10 min stop @ work (boxes had foriegn postage on them). Very poss. from stress but the gonads and ampulle were still dangeling from the body, on my other star when the arm detached so did the inards of the arm....I do suspect the coral banded though as the arm also did not appear to be dropped as it was a bit ragged, also i have seen my CBS act rather "nippy" towards many things before. I am just trying to see if anyone has had a ravenous CBS before (should have just asked that) as i ruled out other poss. except for stress and was hoping for another to have a bad cbs....

 

Well yah, I've had plenty of bad CBS, IMO they're not real reef safe in the sense that they will attack other creatures. I've seen them catch small fish, snatch fins and scales off larger fish, kill other inverts for being around them and I've seen them hunt and kill acro crabs.

I've seen hundreads of arms fall off and still dangle junk from themn(man, I hate seeing the other end crawl away, if its still there). Its a very common occurance. Usually, the wholesaler has them long enough to cull the bad ones. When our Baja station is online, we get hundreads of stars per shipment (bi-weekly). I get to follow the animals thru the complete COC, and see what happenned. For us, it's usually heat related. Either in the collection boat leg, or the transport to the airport. The S. Pacific is no different in that respect. I keep all our exporters airport weather reports in my links folder. I check prior to orderring if they're having a hot one, or a cyclone, etc. The Solomon Islands were sending us some real bad shipments for a while. At 110 degrees on the tarmac, it was pretty obvious to me what went wrong. I'm not saying thats what happened to yours, I'm just saying, with stars its to hard to tell what really went wrong. I'd ditch the CBS just iun case.

 

roger that, he just went into the tank @ work. I caught him chewing on the star this morning. Second bad cbs ive had so they are off my totally reefsafe list for good. I've always wanted to goto the source of collecton to see waht happens before the warehouse....maybe oneday.

 

Mexico is a pretty cheap trip. You could do a day trip to the village who collects for us in baja when they're back shipping again.

I'm in the "most crabs suck" boat. I don't like mithrax (emeralds), arrows, CBS, decorators or pom poms in my reef tanks. All can, and will, do damage when they attain size. Now acro crabs are different