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pcurry18

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Once again im relying on everyones expertise here. I just found 3 Anenomes on a piece of live rock i bought...SCORE! I was feeding them, and along came a starfish. It was a seven legged one, white, with little brown spots. My reef buddy told me that it was a parasite and i should remove it immediately. i did and its now in a holding bucket. Im going to affix my macro lense and snap some photos of this lil bugger. Can anyone help ID him in the interim?
 
yes that is the pic of the starfish i have. Is it a parasite, good/bad? The anenomes are unidentifiable to me. All i can see are their tenticles. They dont move around much. Yes i bought a tonga rock 5# beutifully covered already with coralin from the LFS and it had them attached to it apparently. I just noticed them today after having the rock for about 5 days. Is this good or bad!
 
More often than not there usually a pest. Not sure bout the star fish as I never really had a reason to look into them, but it seems like there is some stigma around them. The anenomes are probably aiptasia, or manjano or tulip anenome's. Try a google image search and see if one of those is like what you have. At first theyre very interesting to look at but can be very prolific once established along with stinging and prohibiting growth of desirable corals they can be difficult to remove from the tank.


-Justin
 
i have researched and came to learn that these are infact aiptapia. I can remove the rock, so im gonna pull it out and torch them. I read that fire for 20 seconds is pretty effective. any other suggestions?
 
i can say with some certainty that they do not like fire. I burnt them lil dudes till they fell off the rock. I hope that kills em. Ill keep you posted!
 
IF that doesnt work, I tell you what does.

Glue.

Get some glue you mount your frags with take the rock out and cover it real thin.

I do it to mine and they never come back :-)
 
LMAO...u use glue for your frags...ive never heard that..what type of glue is it. Remember i havent had a reef tank in about 13 years...times have changed...thanks in advance for the info
 
Yes, glue indeed! It does not work for the soft style corals that slime alot as they will almost always slime their way off, but I have been able to use it very effectively for SPS types. Its a special gel glue (like superglue) that you can find in almost all LFS relatively inexpensively.

As for the aipstasia, you found the ones you knew about, but those little critters are extremely difficult to kill off. Just about any remnant can (and will) make a new one. Peppermint shrimp love to eat them, and might be well worth looking into.

I have many of those starfish in my nano, and they just go about combing the rocks and sides of the tank. They do not harm my corals or the fish and kinda look cool in my opinion, but do seem to propagate pretty easily.
 
thanks for the input...ill look into that glue...as for the starfish, ive found 5 of them already...they kinda got flushed...ill leave the others (if any) alone and see what happens...im definetly getting peppermint shrimp!
 
peppermint shrimp are "Known" to eat them, but not always.

The glue john sellls at yourreef, its in the glass case called ICE Gel I think. But its very good at covering them up.
 
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