I haven't seen my melanurus eat one off the front glass. I just have a suspicion, based on the constant hunting behavior and based on the correlation of star numbers.
They can be. The ones in my system have a taste for zoanthids and if you don't have knowledge of this (I eventually read about it) they don't make it obvious. But if you have them and you notice your zooanthid colony not opening like it should or gradually getting smaller while everything else is doing well I guarantee if you pick up the coral colony and start inspecting underneath and in between the polyps you will find small ones there who are eating your polyps. They don't do it fast enough not to keep zooanthid because you can manually remove them from the colony before they decimate it but it can get irritating having to de-starfish zooanthid colonies every few months
I have a shrimp in my 300 for 6 months now never adding a star only thing for him to eat is astrea and I still see him nightly looking for more…
From the internet-
I'm definitely not overfeeding, I have no algae, and it looks like the only thing that would keep them fed is corraline algae. And yet I still have hundreds if not thousands in my tank. I don't think they will slow down.
Do to my predators I couldn't add ànything that ate them around 5 years ago. I had a huge outbreak and I would manually net all the ones on the glass in the am and there were some big suckers. I noticed they were feeding on my coraline algae and once they pretty much ate most of the coraline algae in the tank there numbers and my netting significantly went ðown over months and years later I've never had another outbreak/bloom of them since although there are always some in the tank.
Purely from looks perspective. A tank over run with Asterina looks like chicken pox. Also, some have reported “some variation” of Asterina to eat Zoas.
I might have to explore this as an option. I imagine finding one of these is a challenge, however.
It's been an issue for well over a year. I haven't seen any indication that the numbers are tapering off either.
I’ve had reefs for like 18 years so I can’t remember how long it took for mine to level out. I do know I had “plague like” proportions of them at one time but now they are just fine. Couldn’t tell you what changed.
Just have to live with them… I’m in the same boat and my population of them just increases daily as they happily breed every water change. I will say that you may not have true asterinas as the ones we think are ‘asterina’ are actually aquilonastra species. These are much less harmful to reefs.
I actually like them too. To my knowledge, no studies have actually be conducted on what these guys eat, but I would guess they most likely eat biofilms (or, possibly, similar to Chocolate Chip Starfish, they may eat biofilms, microalgal films, and small invertebrates like pods, worms, etc.).
makes sense, I don’t have a heavy coraline build up either ways since my urchins strips it off the rocks. I don’t mind them for the time being as long as they don’t explode in numbers, more variety to the ecosystem for now.
