Crinoid or Basket Star owners

[Geoff]

i have always been fascinated by these. how difficult are they to keep. i know about the feeding at night. what size food do they eat. all i know is i have an epidemic of tube worms right now. apparantly i have a fair amount of somekind of plankton going in the tank.

thanks,

G~

[Doug1]

Geoff, not only is right size and amounts of food a toughy to provide, they are so fragile they dont ship well at all

[Havre]

Use to have one. there pretty cool but they tip alot of stuff over, also I think they prefer cooler water around 70 degrees. Mine lasted about a year and ate quite often by placing a piece of squid or shrimp under him. If you get one and he dies get him out right away ,with all that body mass they can pollute a tank really quick!

[Big Dave]

I have had a basket star for about 3 months now. I had a Rio on my skimmer that froze up and polluted the water- aweful smell! The water smelt for a few days. The star lost about half of it's arms but did make it. The arms are growing back and it seems fairly healthy so far. I feed DTs and golden pearls, plus it opens up when I feed mush sometimes too. It found an area it likes and never seems to travel more than a foot from it. No fish pick on it and the star doesn't bother any corals either. HTH

-Big Dave

[Spanky]

Geoff,

Give me an idea of which one you're talking about and I'll try to walk you through it. Husbandry ranges from difficult to easy, just time consuming.

Jerel

[Geoff]

Spanky-i have a hard time getting id's on what i would be ordering from the LFS. all they can tell me is basket star, sea lilly, ... and where. i was hoping to get some species to look for.

Big Dave-do you know what kind you have, or where it came from?

it seems like the more colorfull ones are from the indo-pacific area, while the cool looking black ones are from around you. i would be ordering one from somewhere so as not to do this trial and error, or go i saw this yellow one with lots of arms, should i get it.

thanks,

G~