Reef Central Online Community - Red & Black Sea Star Help

This is a very common problem with a lot of species of sea stars or as I call them starfish.
It is honestly a mystery as to why they do this,but it seems to effect Linkia stars worse than the Fromia S.P species (which is what this one is). This starfish is sold as a red Fromia or a black tip Fromia from wholesalers.There are also Fromias called tile stars which like the one above do not suffer from this as much as the blue and red linkias do.
I will be totally honest and say that about 4 out of 10 red Linkias have this happen and about 7 out of 10 blue Linkias have this same sickness/problem happen to them.For some odd reason the dalmation or speckled Linkias seem to not suffer from this hardly ever if at all ?
In my time dealing with these animals I have seen this happen more than I would like to even admit ,but I can say that not all of these star fish are doomed to have this happen. In my opinion I think it is a problem in how they are collected,shipped and taken care of while waiting to be shipped to wholesalers or the problem begins at the wholesalers ?
I honestly think it is some sort of bacterial or fungal infection that causes them to just blow up and start to deteriorate on one or two arms and then it starts to progress to the rest of the body of the animal.
I have tried many many things to stop it once it occurs but I have NEVER sucesfully stopped it and got a starfish to live once this starts to happen ?
I have however learned that slow acclimation/dripping them if your container they are being drip acclimated in have a heater or just floating them and slowly taking a small amount of water out of the bag they are floating in and adding the same or smaller amounts of water back in the bag for about 45 min. to a hour(longer than a hour seems to stress them out more than the slow acclimation does),this is the method we use as it seems dripping them seems to cool there water instead of keeping it at the temp that the bag they have been in floated in the tank and gotten used to. Also One of my biggest rules with all stars except brittles and serpents is to not touch the bottom area(feet and mouth) of them if I can keep from it and I also NEVER let air/oxygen touch them at all.I just make sure I have changed all of the water they were shipped in to my tanks water and then pour as much out of the bag as I can,then I just submerge the bag in my tank and gently turn the bag over and let him slide out of the bag or if he is not gonna slide out I try to grab the top of the star as gently as possible and set him on the substrate or a rock with NO corals that could possible sting,infect or any other things that may happen to them. I also have wondered about how the collectors,wholesalers and all others in the chain of them getting here handle and feed these animals?
I am in no way saying you can not keep a blue or red linkia in a tank sucessfully,we had our last one for six years until we redid our tank and moved him to a new tank,he died about 3 weeks after that.
But I will say that the success ratio between the 2 species is much less of a mortality rate in the red and tile Fromias for sure.
Hope this helps as me and my wife and crew love these guys and have done a lot of our own research on them ourselves.

I wil say that I have had a great amount of sucess with the Fromias vs Linkias in the last 8 years and that if you want a starfish in your tank these are the way to go for sure!! Also I hate to say it but the one in your pic is probably a goner for sure.

One last thing,it is also nice if were you buy them from is honest on how long they have had the specimen you are interested in,usually if they have been in a shops tanks for more than 5 to 7 days there chances of surviving are MUCH MUCH greater than if he just came in 2 or 3 days before. Thanks and good luck Scott T the okie scott !