Tomb or excavate?

[Garrett Keller]

I need some help making a decision to save a starfish or let the montipora entomb the little guy. Every night when I feed my fish I notice his tentacles reaching out to catch something to eat. Recently I've been giving it food as I watch the hole in the monti growing smaller and smaller. I'm curious to see what others think and do you think it would be a good idea to try and enlarge(cut) the hole so he can get out?
View attachment 584186

 

[Garrett Keller]

 

[Garrett Keller]

 

[seagoblin98]

Save the star

 

[Garrett Keller]

That's what I was thinking. I think the monti will heal itself... I have never cut montipora before and I'm not sure if anything special needs to be done while fragging.

 

[Dsnakes]

Depends if you like him or not ;) if you're feeding him, you must. I would take some small bone cutters, and try and clip in that section a bit. See if you can remove the star and relocate. Then you have saved a happy star and possibly new Monti Frag!

 

[Garrett Keller]

Depends if you like him or not ;) if you're feeding him, you must. I would take some small bone cutters, and try and clip in that section a bit. See if you can remove the star and relocate. Then you have saved a happy star and possibly new Monti Frag!

Good call, I wasn't even thinking about getting a frag out of the deal. I just hope I don't spend the time on getting him out then my flame angel beat him up the way she does my Nassarius snails. She can definitely be brutal. My Nassarius snails won't even come out until dark and if they are out in the daylight they never have their siphon in the air. That's the first thing she targets when they come out. Thanks for the input.

 

[Ocelaris]

I'm almost sure he/she can get out of there by themselves, mine float up and away when the lights go out. If it doesn't move, that's it's fault. I have them floating around the tank all the time. There's not a reasonable way to extract those mini brittle stars, pretty sure it'd be damaged severly trying to extract it. I flush a few down the drain every day cleaning my filter sock. I try to save them when I can, but it's impossible to remove them from filter floss sometimes and dismembering them is almost crueler than a freshwater dip with chlorine.

 

[BluewaterLa]

I've done this in the past only to realize that the same little brittle star or another one of the many I have will take up the real estate and eventually get into the same predicament. Most of them can get out despite our thinking otherwise and some are just going to get trapped eventually from coral and coralline algae growth over tiny holes they reside inside of withing our rocks.
Still I try to save as many as I can and this is the most time consuming part of cleaning power heads and filter socks, removing all the brittle stars.
My kids usually like to help with this part as they get to gather them and put them back into the tank and refugium.