Feather Dusters - A case of Profiling!

1stMarineTankDude · Sep 4, 2024

Yesterday, I posted about a random single sighting of aiptasia which popped up out of my sand bed. I sucked it up with a turkey baster and sent it to explore the local water treatment plant. Today, I noted a fanned creature sticking up and out from under a mushroom coral. I knee jerk reaction, stuck my arm in the tank grabbed the plug and before i knew it, popped it off and killed it as well. Only to think it through and learn that I had a feather duster hitchhiker. ha-ha, am i a bad person for having killed it? Do they provide anything other than a natural scape for your animals? I'd wished I'd reacted slower, but the appearance of the Aiptasia had me kicked into prevention mode. I'd like to get back the last 10 minutes.

NonstopSoda · Sep 4, 2024

Feather dusters are very common hitch hikers and there’s a good chance you’ll get another one soon, they don’t do much except for filter feed and with filter feeding they clean out some excess nutrients but the small ones usually don’t do too much in terms of filtering

Tinnerito · Oct 7, 2024

1stMarineTankDude said:
Yesterday, I posted about a random single sighting of aiptasia which popped up out of my sand bed. I sucked it up with a turkey baster and sent it to explore the local water treatment plant. Today, I noted a fanned creature sticking up and out from under a mushroom coral. I knee jerk reaction, stuck my arm in the tank grabbed the plug and before i knew it, popped it off and killed it as well. Only to think it through and learn that I had a feather duster hitchhiker. ha-ha, am i a bad person for having killed it? Do they provide anything other than a natural scape for your animals? I'd wished I'd reacted slower, but the appearance of the Aiptasia had me kicked into prevention mode. I'd like to get back the last 10 minutes.

Feather dusters usually are good, as they filterfeed detritus from your system. Some species however can potentially choke out all of the nutrients. Most are benificial though, and next time you see one, you should just identify it, and move on.