Feather Duster_headless
 

Hi,
I've had two fether dusters for about 3 months doing OK. I looked to-day and one of them the Feather section is sitting on the rock beside it's tube? Did it die? or what?
Jim

under stress i've read that feather dusters will popped out of the tube and move to a more ideal place. i dont personally have experience with them but that is what i have heard

If they are stressed yes they will drop there "crown"
If there stressed because of lack of food or flow or something like that.
Chances are bad.
If there stressed because of a specific event and they were healthy otherwise.
It will regrow its crown.

If it survives for a few weeks, it'll regrow its crown but the new crown will be smaller.

Thanks for all the feedabck I hope it survives. It was doing well but I had a Phospahte problem and have been doing water changes every second day to get phosphate lowered. I am almost there and his crown was off so I hope it was just the water changes.
Jim

Once out of a blue moon sometime if I do have problem with my water for some reason even I filtered all the water.. maybe my Puffer Poo or something causing water issue. .. I mostly will stuff a bag of Nitrate Sponge or Phosphate Sponge to bring everything under control

I would bet that it will grow a new crown. The first feather duster I got did the same thing about a week after I put it in the tank (I have 5 now all doing great :)). I left it alone and about 3 or 4 weeks later he was back to normal. Seahorse Fanatic posted that the new crown will be smaller but that is not the case with mine, actually I think it ended up being a bit bigger. Might have to do with the type of feather duster it is though. This one's crown is mostly brown with a bit of yellow.

HTH

Until I pulled my tank down recently, I had 2 large feather dusters in my tank. One of them was perpetually happy, never did anything out of the ordinary, but the other was a different story. On one occasion I noticed that it threw it's crown, and the next day it had crawled out of it's tube completely and was curled up under a piece of rock about 6" from it's tube. I figured "what can I do?" so I left it to do what it would... About a week later I looked in the tank and voila, it had crawled back into it's tube and had regrown about a cm of crown and was out and feeding. I believe it tossed it's crown 2 or 3 more times in the time that I had it and always within a week it had regrown enough to feed with.

Very interesting critters! :biggrin: