Sand-sifting Starfish: A Job (too) Well Done! - Sand-sifting starfish (Astropecten polycanthus)If you’ve ever shopped for a marine aquarium cleanup crew, you’ve probably noticed that these packages often include so-called sand-sifting starfish—rather bland-colored, burrowing stars of the genus Astropecten that can reach about a foot in diameter. As their common name implies, these stars are sold to hobbyists for the purpose of consuming detritus and uneaten food and turning over the sand bed. However, what’s often left out of the language used to market these stars as utility organisms is the fact that they tend to do their job too well. Eating themselves out of house and home What do I mean by this? As sand-sifting starfish move through a sand bed, they consume any edible item they come across—and that’s not limited to uneaten fish food that you don’t want to decompose and foul your tank. In the process, they also gobble up all the microfauna they encounter, such as worms, snails, tiny brittlestars and sea cucumbers, “pods,” etc. This very efficient eating behavior has two undesirable outcomes: Very commonly, the starfish very rapidly consumes all the available microfauna and then starves to death (potentially unobserved in the sand bed, where it can decompose to the detriment of water quality). You’re left with a sand bed that’s now essentially devoid of all the life that was keeping it healthy to begin with—and that you more or less paid good money for when you purchased your live rock and/or live sand. - reefs
Posted on: Tue, 11 Nov 2014 20:42:27 +0000
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