sand sifting sea star ate a snail!

bpayh · 10-08-2004, 12:34 PM

say that 10 times fast *

i'm on my first SW tank, it's a 10-gallon FOWLR (i hope that's ok, you guys seem to be primarily about reefs....) and i got a sea star because i saw one at LFS and was totally hooked. yeah somewhat of an impulse buy, and now i'm reaping the consequences, to some degree.

ok long story short i got a trio of astraea snails to help curb a brown diatom problem. i acclimated them and added them to the tank yesterday. last night i checked in on them to see how they were doing, and i could only find two of them! for the life of me, i couldn't spot the 3rd snail.

today i spotted my sea star moving to a new spot, but he had a highly conspicuous bulge in his center! i think it's not hard to figure out what happened. i can't find the shell; i figure it's under the sand someplace, where the starfish dragged the snail before it sucked out the meat.
i promptly returned the other 2 snails to LFS today.

i had planned on getting some hermit crabs to help keep the tank ground clean but now i'm not so sure that's a good idea! my options, as i see them, are these....

1. remove the starfish, perhaps to it's own personal small tank, and introduce a conventional cleaner crew into my tank
2. keep the starfish as my sole bottom cleaner
3. get some other cleaners that are compatible with the starfish. unfortunately i don't know what those would be. i was told that even cleaner shrimp could possibly be in danger because those crafty starfish can hold themselves up, making a sort of 5-pillared archway, and just wait for something to go under and then BAM fall on it. my starfish is kind of small, maybe 4'' diameter, but i don't want to buy a $16 cleaner shrimp that'll just get ambushed and killed!

any advice or suggestions or any info at all?

bpayh · 10-08-2004, 12:50 PM

i guess i should add that i would like to keep the starfish in the tank if at all possible. thanks!

bpayh · 10-11-2004, 04:27 PM

can it be that no one knows anything at all about starfish, or was the post really that unintelligible, or is this site just not as friendly as i'd hoped?

somethingfishy · 10-11-2004, 04:45 PM

Sorry I don't know anything about these. I found this post and apparently you may need a huge 200 gal tank. Take a look

http://www.3reef.com/cgi-bin/yabb/Ya...num=1090306706

markgsiy · 10-11-2004, 04:45 PM

Hi, I am not a moderator, just a fellow reef enthusiast. Just to let you know, I too have a star fish like yours with other snails such as astrea and another smaller kind - forget the name of it. In any case, all of them live happily together in my relatively small tank (35Gal) including a Brittle starfish and a few emerald and blue legged hermit crabs.

I got them all to keep my reef clean and tidy. They do a marveous job, although I think I need more of them. Niether of my star fishes have ever eaten any live snail or animal unless it was already dying or dead to begin with. It actually ate one of my peppermint shrimps that seemed to have died due to my poor acclimation procedure when I added it to my tank.

It would be more likely that the snail your starfish ate was already not in good condition and was dying or dead when your starfish got to it.

I am not an expert on this, but I have not seen any of my cleaning crew killed by any of my starfishes in my tank.

Anyway, just my opinion...

BTW, this is a great web site. I was able to gather information and suggestions that have kept my tank in shape. It could be that the last few days have been vacationing days, so give it a few days.

Mark

somethingfishy · 10-11-2004, 04:50 PM

I was just thinking about Saltyfish's star. *Its a chocolate chip but she said on time that she has had to pull it of her conch. *I think it may be part of their natural diet.

It it were me with that small of a tank you may want to dump the star and get some nerite snails. *They are excellent sand sifters.

Again I don't know a anything about these stars. *Just trying to be friendly and help you out. *I will be on the look out for more info. *

OOPS made a boo boo I said Nerite I ment Nass. Vibex
I belive that there are other types of Nass but you want the Vibex

amcarrig · 10-12-2004, 02:57 AM

If that's your "typical" sand sifting star then it is not a fish/snail eater:

http://www.marinedepotlive.com/1304394.html

I have one in my 90 gallon and it doesn't bother anything. That being said, I believe that it feeds primarily on sand fauna so it's quite possible that it might starve in a tank as small as yours. I have never seen this star eat fish food of any kind.

If you can trade it in to the fish store, go ahead and do that.

bpayh · 10-12-2004, 06:10 AM

thanks for the posts and info everyone!

my starfish seems to be doing well. several sources have told me that he's a detritovore, so i have fed him a little bit (dropped in the tiniest amount of brine shrimp for him to find). plus my tank was set up with some live sand from the store, so he may be doing alright with that. there are definitely little critters in the sand, burrowing and so forth--maybe he finds and eats those, too?

i recognize, though, that the starfish could potentially grow quite large. he's only 3'' in diameter right now but if he gets a lot bigger i will definitely take him out.

as for the snail, i was talking with someone yesterday and they suggested that the snail was already dead, too, and that the starfish just found him. he said that those astraea snails don't have a great track record, and whenever he gets some a small proportion, like 1 or 2, always die. and he's been keeping tanks for 8 years. so, maybe i'll get a few snails and a hermit and see what happens!

reiple · 10-12-2004, 06:35 AM

Somehow your starfish does look different from other reef safe sand shifting starfish. I also think the snail was either dead or dying and these animals are opportunistic feeders.

Yes Astreas are sometimes easy sometimes hard to keep. But not same all the time. I add as few as 6 at a time. Mostly 12. This year In four tries (6,6,12,12) all six in the first died, one in the second survived, all twelve survived and last 12 are still alive.

Before they just die on me. Nowadays they survive. I have two guesses. Before I have almost zero hair algae. Then I had hair algae problems which was lessen by frequent water change and scrubbing. But it gets tiresome so I returned to trying Astreas snails. Well this years group were picking rocks clean of hair algae.

So my guess is to ensure good survival you need to have enough hair algae in your tank for their food. Once all hair algae is gone and no more, well no food means death for them.

Ward · 09-21-2008, 08:44 AM

My purple and cream sand sifting star loves to eat snails. I haven't tried large turbos yet, since they tend to knock over corals. So far, the only snail it can't eat is large star snails. I think a star snail is an Astrea. Small star snails can be swallowed, even with their sharp edges.