Asterina starfish

[Mjrenz]

I believe that I have the type of asterinas that are eating my zoanthids, they're a little hard to see but they are in this picture. I've seen a few of the white ones in my tank for a long time now but these are darker in color. Aside from getting a harlequin shrimp what else can I do to get rid of these? The zoanthids in the picture were previously completly covering the rock but they have started dying and leaving bare spots

 

[Duffer]

Without the harlequin shrimp, which I have one and he did a fantastic job , you would have to manually remove them..I tried this at first and it was a lost cause...where there is one there are many more..i now feed my shrimp a cc starfish that I keep in my sump

 

[Retro Reefer]

If you see one you probably have ten times that in your tank.. I had a nano that was over run with them, I just manually removed them anytime I spotted one and over time I was able to eradicate them.. watch out for small fragments of their legs which grow into adults. Probably pulled 35-40 from my 14 gallon nano over about 4 months, I had no idea I had that many.

 

[rkpetersen]

Not saying that you don't have zoa-eating asterinas, but be sure that they are the cause, because zoas can die back like that for quite a few other reasons or no obvious reason at all.

 

[Mjrenz]

I'm seriously considering the harlequin as a long term solution and my lfs has one, the only problem is that they're not really local and over an hour from my house. I'm going out of town this weekend and I don't think I'll be able to get there before I leave so it'll be nearly 3 weeks before I can get one. Is there anything else that may help in the interim, maybe an iodine dip? I can manually remove what I see for now but can't really do anything while I'm gone

 

[Mjrenz]

I don't believe there is another reason , all my other corals including sps are thriving. I regularly test the water and maintain the salinity, everything is very stable.

 

[Mjrenz]

I took the rock out and was able to find these 4 on it. All of them were right at the edge of the zoanthids mat

 

[Mjrenz]

Is there anyway to tell by the way that they look if they are the zoanthid eating type?

 

[Butuz]

I had the same thing. I noticed my frozen apple zoa was irritated, saw this guy firmly at the trunk. Despite removing him, I think he did some damage. My thriving zoa is now almost dead.

 

[Mjrenz]

I hope I don't lose these ,they are the most brilliant orange I've seen in zoanthids and I paid quite a bit for them

 

[Duffer]

If you can remove the rock with the zoas try dipping them. I use bayer. I recently bought some new frags and after dipping them there were a few starfish ..killed them which was a good thing

 

[Poseidon03]

I had some go to town on my Sunny D zoas not too long ago. They looked a lot like those.

 

[Mjrenz]

The only thing I have on hand to do a dip is iodine, would that have any affect on them?

 

[Kimberely]

Following because I'm having the same issue. My zoas are disappearing slowly and I've pulled over a dozen asterinas out over the last few days, many of which were on my zoa colonies.