My Feather Duster is falling apart... (1 Viewer)

[Rick]

My Feather Duster is falling apart. The base of it is all deteriorated, and about half way up the tube is broken... if you prop the duster up on a rock, it will still pop out. However after a while with the waterflow it will dangle off the side of the rock because of the break in the tub.

Any ideas of what is causing this or how to fix it? :?

Thanks
Rick

 

[Guest]

to clarify: the tube is intact up near the top, right? it's just the "back" end of the tube that's damaged, right?

I've kept exactly 1 FD for the past 9 months, so take everything here as a newbie opinion.

Feather dusters like nice laminar slow flow, as far as I know. If the crown seems like its blowing around, the the flow is either too trbulent, too forceful, or both.

FD crowns sift particles. the large particles become part of the tube itself. This process is as I understand it, fully automatic, so the tube just continues to grow in time. and the back end falls off/apart.

soft tube FD's naturally live in soft sediment. You might try burying it partially in the sandbed, but that never worked for me. What has worked for the past 8 months or so is I drilled through some LR, and eased the back end into the hole. Over time the animal has continued to extend the tube forwards, I expect one day to see the tibe tipped out of the hole, at which time I'll probalby try putting him in a PVC pipe filled with sand.

 

[Guest]

Just leave it alone. it will find a happy place and repare it's tube. They have also been know to drop thier crowns from time to time and grow a new one. Feather dusters are pretty hardy.

 

[Guest]

My new FD emits this little milky cloud every now and then. What's that?