Emerick Fish Tank

[Emerick Elementary]

What do yellow tang fish eat?

Do the bumps on the chocolate chip seastar help it do something?

Why are the two yellow tailed damsel fish so aggressive?

How big can chocolate chip seastars get?

Why do the serpent stars hide so much?

Will the hermit crabs eat anything in the tank?

Do some anemone make deadly stings?

Why does the gorgonian sometimes have long spikes and other times does not?

[saltwaterfishman]

Yellow tangs eat algae. They can also eat frozen foods and lots of pellet foods. 

[dbartco]

Bump

[Squishie89]

Do the bumps on the chocolate chip seastar help it do something? I believe the bumps help them camouflage themselves.

Will the hermit crabs eat anything in the tank? Pretty much! They are scavengers and usually eat what they can.

Why does the gorgonian sometimes have long spikes and other times does not? It sounds like the long spikes you speak of are the polyps! Like all coral, polyps are the actual animal in/on the coral and are how the coral eats especially when non-photosynthetic. The polyps can expand retract, usually expanding to better grab food.

[davelin315]

Hi guys, let me answer just the first question and throw in a mini-science lesson, too!

 

Take a look at the mouth of the yellow tang.  The form and structure are both important - you'll notice that it has a longer "nose" and that the teeth are very tiny and you will have a hard time actually seeing them (look for the white outline inside the mouth, those are the teeth).  The teeth themselves and the size of the mouth indicate that it has structural adaptations to help it eat algae.  The long shape of the mouth also allows them to extract it from nooks and crannies and you'll often see them picking over rocks to get turf algae from in between cracks and crevices in rocks or even on the backs of turtles.  Technically the yellow tang will eat meaty foods as well as algae, but they are typically classified as herbivores.  When you look at how these tiny teeth help it, they act like little scrapers and can crop algae down all the way down to whatever it is growing on.  If it had a big wide mouth or big sharp teeth, that would indicate that it probably eats other animals and that it uses the teeth to either trap them or to cut them apart.

[davelin315]

OK, I'll answer one more... sea anemones are Cnidarians and they have what are called nematocysts.  These nematocysts are like tiny little harpoons or needles that can be shot out of the cells.  They then pump chemicals into whatever they hit.  This is kind of like a bee sting - some are more potent than others and some people are more sensitive to it than others.  To a small animal that wanders into an anemone, this sting can be deadly, but most of the ones you will encounter won't have any real affect on a person unless they have an allergic reaction.  That said, there are close relatives to anemones that can be deadly to people such as some jelly fish and some zoanthids (types of polyps).  Jelly fish like the Man 'o' War can paralyze people and cause them to drown while some zoanthids have what's called palytoxin which is pretty deadly.

[dbartco]

Thanks guys. The kids really appreciate everyone jumping in to answer these questions.