Feather duster dying?

[KevinB]

I've had a large hawaiian feather duster for about 6-7 months now and up until the past couple of weeks he's been doing fine, never shed his crown or anything

I've noticed over the past few weeks he has started coming out less and less...that is, he still comes out of the rock, but not as far as he used to. Today he is only coming out about 1/5 of what he normally would. He has been slowly withdrawing more and more as time has gone on. He still reacts quickly to touching. My parameters are normal and stable...and I feed a cube of filter feeder food every other day to the whole tank.

Any advice?

[+Grog]

I haven't had the large ones from HI but I do have many small ones on my live rock.

Something may be nipping at it is my thought. When I had my coral beauty, it ate all my algae and nipped at the feather dusters. They disappeared.

After the coral beauty jumped after a few weeks the feather dusters started reappearing again.

[KevinB]

Strange...maybe so. I have a coral beauty, but I've had him for around 3 months and I haven't seen him nipping at the duster. I did just add a clown and hawkfish, but I haven't seen either of them bothering it either. I don't think the feathers are damaged, but maybe it is just hiding out of fear.

I've got lots of small dusters on a couple of rocks, dime sized...they are behaving normally...so I don't know what to make of it. I'm upping his feeding just in case he's starving.

[Demodiki]

I've never target fed my feather dusters. If it hasn't shed its crown, I wouldn't worry about it.