Well, I'm glad that someone cleared that little misunderstanding up. As Shawn (or someone, I forget, sorry) mentioned, Astrophyton muricatum is considered a generalist feeder on larger zooplankton, and I was recently asked about this exact subject by someone else who pointed me to this article -- http//aquariumfish.com/fish/aqfm/1999/feb/features/2/default.asp -- which suggests that they will flourish on adult brine. My reply is pasted below.

Basket stars are an absolute no-no for any but the *most experienced* reef keepers, but since it's already in your tank, I'll do my best to try to help you keep it alive.

The article you directed me to is new to me, but it is the most likely guess for the species in your tank. I don't think the article is very good, but I'll come back to that in detail below. First of all, like all animals, juveniles eat smaller things than do adults, and although the adults may very well capture adult brine shrimp, the juveniles simply cannot capture such large prey. Basket stars (of which there are about 100 species world-wide) are simply a highly modified brittle star, and like other suspension feeding sea stars, they have specialized behaviors that allow them to capture particles from the water column as it flows past them. These animals are generally found only in high current areas (~10 cm/s or more), where the star extends it's arms to feed in a bowl-like shape, with the arms curled *into* the current. They feed by trapping particles that enter the bowl in their highly-branched arms, which then coil around the prey and tiny hooks along the length of the arms prevents escape of their prey. At the mouth, there is a comb-like structure that they pass the arm through to remove all the trapped prey, and that prey is then ingested as the arm is re-deployed. The gut is very simple and contained entirely within the central disk, which is useful to know because if the central disk is not puffy and inflated, the star is starving.

Juveniles of these animals typically cling to gorgonians, while adults usually locate a crevice in which to hide during the day and then climb to an elevated point to expand their feeding arms into the current at night. The juveniles simply maintain their perch around the clock and spread their arms after dark. The lighting you use will not really affect them at all, because they only feed at night -- they live in shallow Caribbean seas (they can be found in only 2m of water), and there is no lighting you can buy that equals the intensity they'd experience in the wild. Much more important than lighting is food! These animals need a *lot* of food, because their simple gut is relatively inefficient, and although they may capture hundreds to thousands of prey items during the night, their prey is completely digested by morning, and the star has nothing in it's gut during daylight hours. In general these animals live on the order of 5-7 yrs and often show amazing site specificity -- once they locate a perch they like, the same animal has been observed to occupy that site for more than 2 years in the wild. Although the sexes are separate and most species spawn demersal larvae, some species reproduce by splitting asexually, and if the animals were healthy and well cared for in an aquarium it would be possible to successfully propagate them. OK, that is a little aside, but it should give you an idea of how these animals work and what you might want to consider in keeping yours.

I guess I should start by asking you how big your star is? The star in article that you provided a link to is "about a foot long" -- whatever that means. I assume that means the arms are a foot long, making it about 2 ft in diameter -- at that size it is likely capable of capturing live adult brine, mysids, copepods, amphipods and demersal polychaetes -- contrary to what the article says, the adults of that species can easily span over 1m (3 ft) in diameter and are unlikely to do well in an aquarium for that reason. Also, contrary to what that article claims, although mature basket stars in polar seas generally specialize on euphasid shrimps (krill can compose upwards of 80% of their diet in many places) on the order of 1-3cm (the Ruppert & Barnes reference provided is a general introductory Invertebrate Zoology text which has no specifics about that particular species and for which most information is from temperate stars from the Bering Sea -- not overly applicable to this case), the Caribbean species described in that article is a copepod specialist, and in the wild >90% of the gut contents are tiny planktonic copepods significantly less than 1 mm in length. Anyhow, if your star is in the 4-6" diameter range (typical of those imported to petshops that I have seen), I simply don't think that the animal can handle prey that large, which is why I suggested the mixture of rotifers, algae paste and enriched brine as a starting point (aside from the fact that these should also be the ideal food for your non-photosynthetic gorgonian). By all means you can try adult brine if you have that available, but given that the adults prey specifically on copepods of about the size of baby brine shrimp, I must say that I would be surprised if a star the size I generally see in the shops could possible handle the adults.

While on the subject of the article, aside from the incorrect information it contains, I think it is somewhat misleading for you -- as I said, that had never seen it before, but I don't feel like I had missed anything after I read through it, and still wouldn't recommend it to anyone in the future who asks about these animals. Paul's seahorse feeders (mentioned and pictured in that article) are a great idea for feeding suctorial feeders who can remove animals that become stuck in the mesh or pass close enough to it to be sucked out of the container -- it will do nothing but slow the release of brine in your tank, which will almost certainly mean that the fish will eat them long before they get blown into the star (again, if your star is even large enough to handle such prey). BTW, you can get the same effect without paying $30 for one by getting a plastic worm feeder cone for $1.49 at WalMart -- that's what I've been using for my seahorses for the past 10 years. In any case, neither of these options will do you any good because in this case you are trying to maintain an animal that is a suspension feeder rather than a visual predator, and the star can do nothing but wait for the brine to escape from the feeder and drift into it's feeding arms -- although I'm sure you really want a $30 fishing float in your tank , it's probably about the *least* effective way to feed your basket star. Also, as the author points out that he has a sandbed with a lot of animals that constitute the natural diet of these animals (amphipods, copepods, and worms in particular). If I had to guess, I would suspect that it is feeding primarily on these overflows from the sand fauna, and that the incidental capture of brine (if indeed it does capture and ingest them) the author describes is just the icing on the cake, so-to-speak. As I said originally, a deep sandbed would certainly help in your efforts to keep this animal, but that is not something you have or can provide on short notice (especially with your sifting sea star and arrow crab, both of which will work very hard to eradicate such fauna from your tank). If you hope to start a live sandbed in your tank, the first step is to remove both of these predators...