Atlantis14
New Member
We have an orange Linkia (aka "Gumby") in our 265 gallon for a little over 1 year now. The general consensus seemed to indicate they're hard to keep - but we decided to try it anyway. We also have 1 very large brittle star and 2 sand sifting stars. We drip acclimated Gumby slowly for about 2 hours, if I recall correctly. Have to watch your water temperature to make sure it staying the same between it's acclimation container and your tank temp. We also had been told not to expose it to air. However, it climbs to the very top of our tank and exposes itself...a leg or two at a time. Several times we've exposed it completely to air while doing water changes...didn't realize it was wrapped around the return blowers eating algae...or whatever scum it was eating, lol. We gently remove it and put it back in the water on the rocks. There have been a few occasions where it catches brine shrimp passing by or pellets. It climbs where it wants to go, sometimes spending days attached to the glass and then days gliding over the rocks. Like others are saying, we had read they require live rock (we have 130 lbs) and a mature system. Our tank is 2 years old. Gumby is pretty resilient. It got too close to our carpet anemone a few months ago and a female clown ripped it to shreds. It had a central disk and 2 legs left. We moved it to a little cave area on the sand and within an hour or so it was crawling up the rocks. One of the detached legs crawled around the sand bed for weeks before it withered away. That was sort of creepy. Gumby is doing fine...even started growing 4 new legs. Kind of confusing because it only had 5 legs to start with...now it'll have 6?? We do a water change every 2-3 weeks. We broadcast feed (daily) several different liquid foods for the corals and of course a couple different meaty foods for the fish. Can't seem to convince my husband that maybe we're overfeeding the tank. Other than that, we don't target feed Gumby because our nutrient level is already heavy enough (in my opinion). Our skimmer is finely tuned and we run a UV light a couple hours each day. Don't know if you'll find any of our experience to be helpful - but thought it worth mentioning. I don't recall seeing (or maybe I missed it) how mature your system is and how much live rock you have?
