I'd dip the piece, and see what falls off.
Tough call, you mentioned that the marks look like mucus raised blobs, right? I have seen this before on acropora and I could definitely see how they could be mistaken for AEFW bites, especially in a photograph.
Sometimes the AEFW hold on very strong, thus none fall off via turkey basting, you may have to use a maxi-jet. Another good bet is to look for egg clutches, check with a powerful flashlight when the tank lights and all other lights in your place are off. You may even be able to see them crawl around as they react to the light.
If you spend a few minutes carefully inspecting the underside of your coral like this, then I think you have a good chance confirming/denying if you have AEFW or not.
got a MJ 1200 laying around by chance?
While if unmodded, they are pretty much worthless for in tank flow, they are fantastic tools for cleaning out crap down in yoru rocks and blowing AEFW's off of corals. It will save you the effort of removing the coral or cuttingit up if you dont need to
I am not convinced from those pics you have aefw's. There are some suspect spots for sure, but they are not as pronounced as usual, and usually if all those suspicious marks we are looking at high on the branches was indeed bite marks, you would have very pronounced areas with distinct bite marks towards the base
suspicious for sure, but not conclusive IMO
do you have another acro colony sitting around that isn't doing good. These do look like marks but I am with flyyyguy that I'm not sold on AEFW quite yet. You should be able to find some egg sacks at the base where there isn't any tissue and the bare skeleton is exposed.
what do the egg sacs look like?![]()