hitchiker ID

[Brighteyes_13]

im hoping someone here has seen this thing before. it came with my green star polyps i purchased at J&L last month. i thought it may have been some funky kind of coral but it has since moved and grown.

Heres a pic of it at TRT where they cant seem to help either...
http://www.thereeftank.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=31930

any help is apreciated

[MitchM]

:question:

Baby Linkia?

Mitch

[Brighteyes_13]

it only has 4 arms... do you think it could be a starfish, i didnt realize they could be mulit colored like that.

[christyf5]

I guess some sort of starfish too. Maybe its concentrating all its energy into the fat leg at the moment :wink: It could very well have been damaged and thats why it has a lesser number of legs.

Christy :)

[MitchM]

Yolk sack.... :smile: :question:
I wouldn't worry about the leg count...or the color. Could be a developmental thing.
(hopefully someone will properly id it)

First Doug's colonial tunicate, now this....
howcome you guys on the coast get all the neat stuff?!

Mitch :smile:

[EmilyB]

Yolk sack.... :smile: :question:


:lol:

[MitchM]

...what....

you know.....just before it hits the tadpole stage.

Mitch :razz:

[MitchM]

Hey..read the TRT thread....
told ya it was a baby linkia.....

:mrgreen:

Mitch

[EmilyB]

TRT knows all. :neutral:

[Quinn]

How about Linckia multiflora? I had one hitch a ride from Indonesia (Kanai?) but it didn't last long. :sad:

[Van down by the river]

Way to go Quinn,
Yes it is Linckia multiflora. I've had one drop all 5 legs, within a few weeks new little blue legs appeared from the leg end. Many starfish reproduce through asexual fragmentation. They will split from the oral disk and each new leg will regrow the rest of the entire body.

:sad: The sad part is it took TRT 11 posts to get it right. Although they weren't the worst guesses I've seen on a BB.
:cool: It was also a Canreefer that figured it out for them! :cool:

I'm glad that Mitch was at least going in the right direction on the first reply. I did get a good laugh from his "yolk sack" guess. It is in the same family as the Blue Linckia Linckia laevigata, but a different more colorful species. It is often imported on coral, unfortunately it isn't often on order lists. So usually the only way to get them is as a hitchhiker. The upside is they seem to fragment frequently, so everyone should start being real nice to bright eyes_13 :mrgreen: [/i]

[MitchM]

Hey no fair...
Quinn posted the answer here 3 hours after Darren posted it on TRT.

Mitch :wink:

[Delphinus]

"Van," are L. multiflora any hardier or less hardy or comparable to other linckia types?

After my burgundy linkcia (which I don't think is a true "Linckia" genus) self-destructed I have been turned off from these animals because the sense I get is that they are indeed rather "hit and miss" whether they will eat and thus survive longer than a few months, or not eat and eventually perish prematurely.

PS. Just as an aside, my "fragged starfish" legs did not grow into five new starfish. They all just shrank and eventually disappeared. So I don't know if I'd be going around telling people that it's fine if a linckia drops a leg and that you can happily expect two or more starfish to come out of the experience, and that people should start lining up now for the "frags." Unless L. multiflora is somehow more resilient than the others. Just my $0.02, for what it's worth.