Unresolved Hitchhiker star

Any ideas on this guy?
He has three good legs and three coming back. Size of a dime. Seems to have some red dots at each shoulder and some grey patern on leg tips.


And you can see

 

Looks like an asterina starfish

 

Asterina, CUC member

 

I was hopeing to hear that, thanks...
There is plenty to clean at the moment

 

How large might asterina get?
Does it reproduce asexually?

 

They don't get reall big, actually the size of a dime sounds like a big Asterina to me...

I'm not sure on the reproduction... sorry

 

It would be more accurate to call it an asterinid which means it belongs to the family Asterinidae. Asterina is just one genus in this family. There are lots of other genera, lots of species, and most of the small species don't belong to Asterina. They're also very difficult to id correctly so asterinid is the best name a non-specialists like us can do.

Some species only have sexual reproduction, some only have asexual, and some have both methods. The small ones tend to have both. If food is abundant one small asterinid can rapidly turn into 100s. If you do a search you'll find tons of threads asking how to control or get rid of them. Most of the small species seem to be harmless grazers on micro-algae, bacterial film, etc. A few are voracious omnivores that will eat pretty much anything that doesn't move and that includes corals. It's pretty easy to tell just by where you find them in the tank.