Ping OPHIURA ! Asterina star problem

saltn00b

Active Member
Ophi,
my battle with these infernal stars has come to a head and i need your advice.
i have one of the species of asterina stars that have tried there hand decimating SPS , i think zoanthids possibly and now lastly leathers.
i pull them out by hand when i see them, which keeps the population pretty low, but they are still there.
i tried a single harlequin shrimp ($35
) and he lasted 2 weeks. i have some secondary issue with new shrimp dissappearing. i think they may be getting eaten by my big old serpent or brittle stars.
what are my options , what can i do ? i need these guys OUT.
please help!
 

spanko

Active Member
Not Ophiura but my suggestion would be to get the large brittle and serpents out of the tank. Maybe into a fuge if you have one, or see if the LFS or a friend can hold them for a while. Then do the Harlequin gig again.
 

saltn00b

Active Member
hey thanks for the input.
while i do have a fuge they would be fine in, or a frag tank...these stars never come out, i only ever see legs at night. i would have to tear down the whole tank, unless i try a trap perhaps...
plus i am not 100% that these are the culprits for this more recent , quick shrimp demise problem. maybe she can shed light on that too. the brittle is the black "hairy" / fancy type, not the green (notorious for invertebrate / fish hunting )
 

ophiura

Active Member
Hi,
What are your tank specs?
Can you get a picture?
Not everything is always as it seems, and we often want to believe things are being eaten as opposed to dying.
Not all brittlestars are considered a risk. What do you feed your brittlestar? Shrimp are very delicate when it comes to being introduced to a tank, and their death is more likely due to that than to predation, IMO. The star would be huge in the disk if it ate them.
I am just concerned you have more going on than meets the eye.
 

saltn00b

Active Member
ok i can get a pic, but of what? i have several stars dried up i can take pics of.
i have caught the stars several times on the corals themselves, leaving a trail of eaten polyps.
i can take a pic of the gash in my leather that this big one started to eat.
the disc on the more visible of the two stars, the serpent star is probably slightly larger than say 3-4 quarters stacked up.
i know that inverts are especially sensitive to parameter changes so i drip acclimate for several hours and then add when the lights are out.
i will take parameters tonight, but corals are growing like mad and are happy otherwise.
 

meowzer

Moderator
If you have the very rare (from what I hear) coral eating asterina, you need to save some ...LIVE...and send them to Cranberry. I think she has been looking for some of them.
 

kingsmith

Member
Doesn't this information call into question all the quick answers to astreina star IDs that are given on theses boards, as well as require anyone who has them to reacess their own star populations?
 

spanko

Active Member
Yeah it did for me too but if you really look at it the stars that are in those links have a distinct darker graybrown color. I don't know about you but the ones in my tanks are noticeably white. I think that most often these that we encounter are the harmless ones that don't cause any concern unless they reach plague proportions. Then it is a matter of nutrient control do deplete their populations. I think you would really need to see some coral devastation being done to know that you had those. I posted this for the OP because he seems to have that kind of a problem.
Hey Saltnoob, got some pictures????
 

spanko

Active Member
There are no absolutes here. Just saying if you read the links posted above, those do not look like the asterinas most of us see.
 

meowzer

Moderator
Originally Posted by spanko
http:///forum/post/3186399
There are no absolutes here. Just saying if you read the links posted above, those do not look like the asterinas most of us see.
OK...for now on....any mini star that is not white is GONE!!!
 

cranberry

Active Member
Asterinas take on all sorts of different shades. Some of mine a stark white, others aren't. None of mine eat coral.


All the years that Garf has had that page up, I've never seen another variety like that show up on the forums or in local tanks. They are not your normal asterina.
 

saltn00b

Active Member
coloration is not a good method. like cranberry , i have a wide array of colors of what i believe to be the same species.
i will take pics of the ones i have collected this weekend.
 

saltn00b

Active Member
btw thanks for those garf links, i did not think to look there - here is the letter i wrote to leroy :
Hello,
my tank developed a population of these nasty critters. but i think they are a variant of the ones you have pictured in this article :
http://garf.org/news26p2.shtml#STAR
mine tend to be mostly symmetrical 5 legged variety, unless you catch one fresh from a split that maybe 3 legs with one dominant one. but they do not have the characteristic "2-long-legs" and reddish color. the color is mostly a mottled gray but unless i have multiple species, i have collected a wide color variety among the individuals. some more tan, some a marbled charcoal / white. i believe they are responsible for zoanthids and ricordia being eaten, and definitely caught them in the act of decimating a beatiful stylophora colony, about the size of a raquetball, and i have caught them on a similar sized pocillapora, and now they made a 1-2 " gash on the bottom of a rare green leather colony i have. they continue to dig out the gash like a burrow. This coral is quite unhappy with this and is sagging now.
i have been keeping the bodies of the collected individuals so i can photograph or send them to someone. let me know if this will help.
also is there any other method of removing them besides manual removal and harlequinn shrimp? for a different reason, i tend to have trouble adding shrimp to my tank lately (i am thinking large brittles are eating them) and the harlequinns are unfortunately quite expensive. I had one that lasted a few weeks, but i did not try the tweezer offerings.
thanks in advance!
 

saltn00b

Active Member
this just a theory of mine, that i have no means of testing, but i think that when star finds a suitable host "meal" it will leave chemical deposits at the site, maybe in the droppings, and the smell of which signals others in the area that there is food to eat there. i think this because how else can they all know to attack one coral at a time?
maybe ophi or someone else more knowledgeable can chime in....
 
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