choco star eating my xenia!

[ddaddy]

About a month ago I bought some xenia pulse coral. It was doing great after a short while. It was happily pulsing and I could tell it was even starting to spread. Then one day I noticed one of my chocolaate chip stars sitting on top of it. At first I didn't worry about it. I thought it was just eating the algae around the coral. After about an hour of the star sitting over the coral I decided to move it. I was shocked to see it had eaten my pulse coral. I have never heard of this type of star ever doing that. Has anyone else ever had this happen? I thought that chocolate chip stars were strictly herbivores/detritivores.
To make matters worse I just found one of my two choco stars dead. It looked like it rotted from the inside out. The other star is doing fine and I'm not sure which one ate the pulse coral. Is there maybe a connection between a star eating a coral and then dying shortly after?

 

[spsfreak100]

A small specimin of the Chocolate Chip Starfish will feed on algae and other herbivourius foods. As they grow older, their diet changes to eating soft corals, sponges, tubeworms, clams, other starfish, and many invertibrates. I recommend you find another home for the starfish.
Graham

 

[ophiura]

Chocolate chip stars are not reef safe and surely will eat snails, clams, scallops, corals and a wide range of other things. While they may eat a bit of algae, they are far more opportunistic scavengers/predators than herbivores. Now they may not like certain corals all that much, and they may end up starving to death before they eat it. How long have you had the stars, and what have you been feeding them, other than Xenia?
FWIW, I wouldn't put it past one star to eat the other.

 

[ddaddy]

I've had the stars for about 6 months now. I never noticed them causing any problems. All my other corals have been doing fine. I guess one of them just really liked the xenia. I'll get rid of the other one shortly. Maybe I should throw a harlequin shrimp in there and watch him make a meal of the star. This is definately the last time I'll ever put a star in my tank. Last time I had a brittle star that ate almost everything. I lost a sally lightfoot, tons of crabs, watchman goby and a pistol shrimp to that thing.

 

[scarybo]

I had the same thing happen to me. I had a chocolate c. starfish who ate my xenia colony. Took him back to the LFS. The xenia grew back and spread like crazy. Now I wonder if I should have kept the starfish and sent the xenia back to the LFS.

 

[ophiura]

Please return the star to the LFS and do additional research before buying other animals. Nearly everyone on this board, for example, could have told you chocolate chip stars are not reef safe and it is a gamble to keep them in a reef tank. It really is not surprising at all it ate something. It did nothing out of the ordinary, except try to live, funny that really, and does not deserve to be fed to something else because of it. Besides, what would you do with the harlequin...put a lot of money into buying it seastars all the time?
BTW, did you ever investigate other reasons you may have lost crabs to the brittlestar (and did you feed the brittle?). While I do not doubt it ate the small fish, crabs are another story entirely, IMO...unless they were very very tiny. There are lots of reasons crabs can die in a tank, having nothing to do with a brittlestar.