Hitch Hiker Starfish

[Plesoine]

The little mini starfish? Not the mini brittle starfish but the little white ones. I've read up on them and they say they can be bad and/or good. We have a lot of them in our tanks and so far no problems. But today I noticed that our acans and polyps corals have looked like crap. One of those lil buggers is on it. Could it be that its eating it? If so, whats the best way to go about removing these lil buggers?

 

[4FordFamily]

Allegedly asterina starfish will eat polyps on occasion. I've not experienced that. Although I really couldn't keep many polyps...

Anyway asterina tend to take over quickly with high nitrates and phosphates. I could literally tell how high they were based on the asterina population. I used that as a way to know when I was time for water changes and GFO for several years.

I manually remove them when they're high up on the glass when adding nori daily. These days I have very few