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Originally Posted by epidemic
Clownfishcrazy
I hope you don't end up with a bunch of little ones from the broken off tips!
Derek
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I actually sort of wish one could propagate
brittle stars this way, but to my knowledge they will not regenerate whole animals from broken off arms. Seastars can often (usually?) do this, but they are built quite a bit differently internally than brittle stars (for example, the digestive system of a
sea star exttends way out into the arms in a major way, but this is not the case with brittle stars). In my experience, broken off brittle star arms might live for a little while and even wander around a bit (reminds me of a horror movie I saw when I was a kid in which a severed human hand and forearm was wandereing around doing nasty things....really freaked me out!), but they don't live long.
There are brittle stars that do reproduce by division, and many of us have these in our aquaria (the ones I have are very small as adults), but I'm pretty sure they divide in such a way that the oral disk is broken in two rather than just severing arms.
