stars and lobsters oh my

[ka34579]

i just got a hang on remora skimmer and about 60 lbs of live rock for my 75 gal, and removed my triggerfish and gave him away. should i get a serpent star or a linkia? and if so how often should i feed each? also how large do blue lobsters get and has anyone had any experience taking care of these guys? thanks

[Geoff]

linkia's are tough to get acclimated. they are very sensitive to changes in salinity. the bad part is that you could have done everything right in acclimating them but the LFS you got it from might not have, or even the distributor might not have acclimated them properly.

serpent stars are much more hardy. they can also be predatory, so small fish could be on their menu. if you feed them once a week you could lessen the chance of it hunting your other fish.

never had a lobster in a tank before. i would guess they are pretty clumbsy. i would also thing they would be pretty oportunistic in their feeding habits. could try and capture and eat some of the other critters in the tank. i am just speculating here.

G~

[ka34579]

i dunno if im underestimating the capabilities of a starfish, but considering that they are not exactly agile, how in god's name are they going to catch a small fish excluding the chance that it might be a dead fish?

[ruhspolostar]

they get up on their legs, entice a fish to swim under them and then as John Badden would say BOOM POW WHACK !!!!

[adrianleewelch]

mine ate some damsels in my 29 gallon, I dont know he caught them, but I'd come into the room and see one halfway in his mouth, I then started feeding him goldfish that I would spear on an insulin needle stuck onto a coathanger, brushing his leg with the fish, he would wrap an arm around the fish and Id pull the spear out, easy ! I fed him one every 5 days or so, he really grew after that

[icebear]

as far as lobsters go, i had a very large slipper type lobster when i first started out.... its actually what my tank was set up for. The thing was very large. It was a messy eater and it ate a LOT... thats one of the things that seems to be universal with lobsters.

They can grow very large
they eat a lot
they are messy eaters
they are clumsy
they can wreak havoc on carefully arranged rockwork


if i ever got one again, it would be a coldwater native in a large tank with mucho filtration and not much else to keep it company and contribute to waste.


my HO and limited experience

[tdwyatt]

Two types of seastars in reference to this topic and they use two different types of locomotion. The "slower" seastars are members of Asteroides and depend on a high pressure hydrovascular system of chambers and vascular lumens called the ambulacral system as their mechanism of locomotion. It primarily drives locomotion via the tube feet, which adhere to the substrate, contract as fluids are pumped out, then relax and "unglue" from the substrate to move. It requires the orchestration of all the tube feet to accomplish directional movement. The other group is the Ophuroids, which rely on intervetebral musculature rather than the ambulacral system for locomotion, and are both quite quick to move and very agile. In this group, tube feet provide mostly traction, while the musculature provides the mechanical advantade of speed and flexibility. Due to intraossical articulation, many of these seastars are restricted to movement within a single plane, others are quite flexible and capable of wide-angle moves in relation to the plane of travel.

...and the Ophuroids are quite capable of caturing fish searching the rock for a place to sleep.