Brittle star ghost legs?

[nanomom]

I swear I just watched 2 brittle starfish legs, just the legs, no body that I could see, crawl out from under a coral and over a rock. I think someone told me once that a new starfish can grow from a detached leg. Is that at all possible? Sorry for the blurry pics.

 

[Mr. Mojo Rising]

impossible to see in the pic. But I would suspect you saw a brittle worm. They are fairly common in our tanks.

 

[ISpeakForTheSeas]

I swear I just watched 2 brittle starfish legs, just the legs, no body that I could see, crawl out from under a coral and over a rock. I think someone told me once that a new starfish can grow from a detached leg. Is that at all possible? Sorry for the blurry pics.

If there was no body, then it most likely was bristle worms.

Brittle Stars (Ophiuroids) can sometimes reproduce asexually, but unlike some true starfish (Asteroids), brittle stars don’t reproduce by dropping legs; rather they split their central disk in half (so they basically very neatly tear themselves into two pieces, leaving legs connected to both halves).

 

[nanomom]

I have a 6 line wrasse, plus my lfs is very careful about pestering hitchhikers, so I know it wasn’t a bristle worm. Or 2. But look what I saw this morning!

 

[timry2]

Its a starfish that split. Its common. If you want it to survive you may want to put it in a QT tank with a piece of rock and feed it every other day.

 

[ISpeakForTheSeas]

I have a 6 line wrasse, plus my lfs is very careful about pestering hitchhikers, so I know it wasn’t a bristle worm. Or 2. But look what I saw this morning!

Nice - yeah, your brittle star split along the disk (so it does have part of the body, but I can see how that would be easy to miss).

 

[nanomom]

Its a starfish that split. Its common. If you want it to survive you may want to put it in a QT tank with a piece of rock and feed it every other day.

I don’t have a QT, but I did move it from the glass to a rock, and it’s chillin in a patch of algae.