I never pulled any of the arms out of my tank "just in case" but I have not seen any of the pieces for about 4 or 5 days now so realistically it is not very likely that any are still with me. They never slimed up or anything like that, they just kinda shrunk and then disappeared.
I couldn't find a whole lot of information regarding the starfish I had. It was sold as a "burgundy linckia" but in some of the articles I read about the linckias, it seems that it could also have been a
Tamaria stria (see "part 2" of this page:
http://www.wetwebmedia.com/seastars.htm ). Not much seems to be known about that particular species, although there does seem to varying accounts of reasonable success with it (I spoke to a number of people who have one, also Rob Toonen makes mention of having one himself in his article on
Linckia sp.:
http://advancedaquarist.com/issues/may2002/toonen.htm ).
In his article Rob Toonen makes mention of taking exceptional care when acclimating starfish. I drip-acclimated mine as I do all my new arrivals but I certainly didn't do it over a period of 24 hours (as Terry Seigel did with his, see
http://advancedaquarist.com/issues/m.../Editorial.htm ).
I hope that yours does not continue its trend of self-severing as mine did. By your description it sounds like you have a different species from mine but one thing that really shocked me as I was trying to research these starfish is that we don't seem to know a whole lot about specific requirements and diet in particular about non-carnivorous or non-meat-eating-scavenging-whatever starfish. A chocolate chip star, for example, can be specifically fed, but not really a linckia. You have to hope it can find enough of whatever slime it's looking for in your tank, or that it can adapt to whatever slimes you do have in abundance -- hardly quantifiable approaches though -- so there seems to me (maybe I'm off base in my observation here, I don't know) that there is an element of "spin the wheel and hope you get lucky." Which is too bad because they're fabulous looking creatures.