Star fish Id? good bad?

[Tjohnson8057]

Have noticed I have these starfish growing in my tank. Was wondering if they were good or bad. There's at least 15. My only guess is that they were hitch hikers on my live rock.

 

[Smells Fishy]

Safe

 

[Ibassfsh]

Asternia starfish/ Safe, but split and reproduce like crazy. They can become an eyesore.

 

[Tjohnson8057]

Ok thx ya there's already a bunch running around the tank

 

[Kworker]

Lol, has anyone ever actually seen one of those in perfect proportion between all its arms? They are always so lopsided.

 

[Unknown]

Lol, has anyone ever actually seen one of those in perfect proportion between all its arms? They are always so lopsided.

+1

HAHA! My roommate has 20-30 of them and none of them are perfect.

 

[mainereefer]

I say bad and kill him... the problem is there are around 1000 types. my experience is if they have color spots on them they eat coral and even without color on them if they run out of food they turn and eat your coral.

if fed well they will drop every arm they have and it becomes a new starfish so they reproduce fast, they are like aiptasia in the fact they will turn into a plague.
even if they dont eat your corals they will irritate them

again I would nuke them...

 

[Eric B]

They are mostly safe but if you have zoa's just keep an eye on them as they wiped out my healthy zoa population out over the course of a few weeks. I actually pulled them off while they were eating healthy zoa's and funny thing is they went for the nicest/priciest one's first but since I'm not a huge zoa guy I have no really high dollar zoa's. I have since added a harlequin shrimp and he has handled the population. I think I had a mixture of the detritus eating ones and zoa eating ones but just wanted to trim the population down. It's a 300 gallon display tank and before the lights would turn on they were crawling everywhere but since the addition of the shrimp you only see a few here and there!

 

[olesalty]

get rid of it. I was cool with the ones in my tank and lately noticed zoa population getting hit hard. Like eric i have pulled them off while on the zoas. Took out all the nice color ones i had first.

 

[Kworker]

I have them and zoas and my zoas are fine. There could be different species that could chomp on them though I suppose. I notice no ill effects of having them so I never bothered with them.

 

[mfinn]

I've seen them attack and eat zoanthids so I remove them every chance I get.

 

[NanaReefer]

Here's one of mine Never had an issue with the solid white ones eating anything but algae off the rock, glass and what not.

 

[mfinn]

I have not seen any of the white ones in my tanks for years.

 

[Kworker]

here's one of mine never had an issue with the solid white ones eating anything but algae off the rock, glass and what not.

its proportionate!

 

[Tjohnson8057]

Hmm we'll right now I know they have plenty to eat in my tank lol whole other issue. I feel like I'm gonna go with bad to be safe they shouldn't be hard to pull out Because there always eating on my glass. Think I'm gonna go with pick them out as I see them easy to grab. I've noticed that there multiplying quick so I don't wanna get over run

 

[Tjohnson8057]

With the harlequin shrimp they look super cool, wondering if one would work in my tank. i have a convict goby and I heard that he might go after small stuff