Discovered a brittle star

Found this guy hiding behind the pump for the skimmer. We'd seen him elsewhere in holes in the live rock, with just tentacles hanging out. ;D

What do people think? He's apparently a detrivore, but we've only found him on Japanese sites so far. Apparently, it's local to this area, and was listed as being findable in the Kagoshima area.

I got stabbed by him today, :-[ (no ill effects, but had to pull the spines out with tweezers) so he's not terribly comfortable to handle, but other than that, he doesn't seem to be hurting anything. I did see a tank at LFS today that was crawling with them to no ill effect as well.

I assume Harlequin shrimp won't eat these right? I'm planning on getting a couple of them for my next tank project, but want to keep a species of starfish as a detrivore (and was thinking these might fill that nitch) While I'm on the topic, will Harlequins tolerate other shrimp, or only in an extremely large tank? I have a couple of peppermints that I'm rather fond of, and want to know if these need to be separate from the harlequins.

 

Most likely, the harlequins will eat the starfish.

 

Well this typically goes against everything a person reads on these stars. I had one that was to be a “scavenger” and was hoping it would help stir up my sand bed from time- to- time. It did an OK job for a several weeks until I started having fish go missing. I first thought it was my carpets that were catching the fish that where drifting into them. Then one day I came home from work to glance at my tank and saw the brittle star on one side of the rock and my mandarin goby on the bottom of my tank swimming by. The brittle star leaped off the rock right on top of the goby and began eating him. By the time I rinsed my arm off to put it into the tank the starfish had swallowed the goby and scooted under all the rock where I could not reach him. That next morning I found the starfish and scooped it out of my tanks and took to my LFS to be given away and told the staff what had happened. Crazy Huh!

 

It seems that Brittles can grow rather large as I have found out first hand with my two Brittles being 9" across! At that size they can become omnivorous, and eat fish!!