Sand sifting starfish

Does this mean it's hungry?

 

And dieing.They usually starve in our systems.

 

Unfortunately Sand Sifter usually do much better in larger established systems. They need enough sand that contains enough of the flora and fauna that the star fish eats, newer tanks just do not cut it. Most Sand Sifters starve to death, sometimes quickly sometimes it takes months. This is one purchase where fish store and vendors do not do enough education on the needs of the animal.

 

Hmm... What's the best course of action ?

 

The only practical intervention is to give it to another hobbyist with a bigger established system.

This is what Liveaquaria says

Saltwater Aquarium Starfish for Marine Reef Aquariums: Sand Sifting Sea Star

You can google what to feed Sand Sifter but no one really has the answer.

 

I strongly disagree with LA; like most other sea stars, the sand sifter is a predator with a specific diet. It is not a detritivore or a scavenger. Once again, a poor helpless animal is misrepresented for the almighty $$.

Serpent, brittle, and some asterina stars are the "clean-up crew"; the rest belong in the ocean until we fully understand- and can realistically provide- the dietary requirements of each individual species.

JM2C

 

"Sand stars are greedy predators of mollusks, worms, crustaceans, and other sea stars and their relatives. They dig up their prey and swallow it whole."

I was trying to find the paper that compared the stomach contents of several different genera within the Asteroidea, but I haven't found it (yet). For the majority of species, their diet consisted primarily of molluscs, with all the other stuff mentioned above comprising the remainder of the stomach contents. They eat a lot.

You'd think that something that slow-moving wouldn't require much food, or would eat tiny animals only, but...they will eat full-grown mussels and may attempt to wrap up and eat larger snails (a couple of inches long) with varying degrees of success. I had one kill a whole handful of Conus bandanus nigrescens in a very short period of time. They don't ALWAYS swallow the prey whole, but may dissolve the animal and eat what they can reach.

There is one paper that I found that mentions a more temperate relative, Asteropecten marginatus, was found to scavenge and included detritus in the stomach contents. That appears to be the exception rather than the rule, judging by the consistency with which these things starve to death in relatively large tanks.

Cheers,



Don

 

Thank you for putting some perspective on it. I had no idea they were such active eaters with the ability to swallow snails and such whole.