6 Legged Star Fish Good, or Bad?

It's only bad if it starts eating your coral!
But the best course of action is to just watch it and only remove it if it starts chomping! It can't eat much and is easy to catch.

I have small 6 legged stars that are a kind or white or sandy color.  They look more like a linkia star than a brittle star, and tend to hang out conscipously around my corals...  I pull them out as often as possible.

However I do have the small brittle look stars, they only have 5 legs on them and don't seem to bother anything at all.  They get up to about 2'' across the legs.  I just leave them alone.

Edited by Crazy Tarzan

If they look like tiny brittle stars I let them be.  If they look like flattened sand stars with a couple legs longer then the others I remove.  Maybe I'm throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but that's what I do.

heres a few pics.



is this what they look like?

You know they look suspiciously ALOT like the coral eating starfish that garf had the article on.

http://www.garf.org/Star/starfish.html

Edited by ssilcox

I actually received a 5 legged mini sand star and the small 6 legged brittle looking star.  I have not seen the small sand star since I put it in, but the brittle looking star hangs out on a small starburst polyp coral.  I will just watch closely to see if I notice any ill effects over the coming months.

2.5 Gal Minibow
Mini powerhead
Coral Life 10Watt 50/50 daylight/actinic bulb
4 Lbs tonga branch rock
6" brittle star
6 legged brittle star
Mini sand star
(3) scarlets
Misc. Polyps
Orange/Red Mushrooms

 

Jake Pehrson wrote: These do look like predatory star fish.  I would watch them very closely.

I once found these first thing in the morning, eating my Xenia. I removed about 20 and never saw them in that tank again.

Edited by Mark Peterson

Unfortunately the worst thing about these stars is that if they do end up damaging corals, by the time you decide that it's them there are so many of them they are almost impossible to irradicate.

A friend of mine had trouble keeping Xenia and Star Polyps for a long time.  Someone told her that these stars ate star polyps so she started taking them out of her tank.  Sometimes she would take out as many as 20 or more per day.  After about a year of picking these things out she was finally able to get star polys to survive in her tank again.  Of course she still finds a few of these stars occasionally.