feather duster lost his feathers....

[Dan Thrash]

so this weekend, my feather duster lost his feathers. i know this is a sign that he might not be happy. i got him a few weeks ago and he has always been in and out of his tube....never stayed out for a real long time. he is in a spot midway up in my 12 gal tank and he gets medium to low flow i think. whenver i feed the tank, he gets plenty of food floating his way...although i've never seen him catch anything.

question is, is there anything i should/could do? move him to a different spot maybe?

thank you!

[chip721]

Featherduster's are filter feeders. Not sure what you're feeding the tank. But food like flakes or frozen is too large for them to use and you won't see them "catch" any of it. They get their nutrients from the water column. Phytoplankton for example can be consumed by them, but it's only micron in size. It's probably still adjusting to it's new environment. I'd leave it alone and keep an eye on it. Continuously fiddling with it will only stress it more. If it's healthy and your tank parameters are good, chances are it will recover.

[Dan Thrash]

ok, i'll let it be. i feed my clowns mysis, flakes and cyclopeeze. that is about it. i think the cyclopeeze is small enough....i hope. besides that, the corals can eat when i clean algae off the glass and blow off the detritus every couple days.

[pooh1989]

I don't feed my feather dusters anything special. They are doing great. I had one "pop" it's crown off and thought for sure it was dead. I left it in the tank and about a month later it regrew it's crown and is just as pretty as ever.

[iamquockie]

the crown will come back...be patient, once you start seeing the little feathers pop out of the tube, the growth is pretty rapid.

[Dan Thrash]

well, actually, i came home from work today and the feather duster was out of his tube and lying on the sand in a couple of pieces. he was dead unfortunately. now what do i do with the tube? i guess i should remove it....??

[bllfish]

It can lose the feather duster. Let it be and it will probably grow back.

[sedorusc]

I think you should remove the tube unless you like the looks of it. I'm not sure whether it will cause problems by decaying though.

[bllfish]

4 year old coco worm, 3 heads later
http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a376/bllfish/2e734734.jpg