Many/Mini Brittle Stars

As in some of my previous post I refer to the Brittle star invasion...
Here is a picture of just 2 days after cleaning the sock out....these were around the top...just as many or more down in the sock here and there...so I toss out at least a hundred a week...that is not stretching the truth at all.
just enjoy the photo...no ID needed...just figured this was the place to post'em.
Later...
LG

These are mostly the size of a nickle...maybe bigger.

 

im telling ya LG that shrimp i told you about would make quick work on them, my pair def control my population

 

How about the community...I dont want my other critters to become chow.. : ) your talking harlyquin shrimp , right?.. I'll go get one right now...I just dont want to have to tear down my tank to get some angry crazy shrimp out'a there !! LOL..know what I mean?

LG

 

They dont bother anything else in my tank, i have a lot of snails hermits small and slow fish and they dont bother any one nor have i heard of them bother anyone

 

An H. shrimp consumes starfish like crazy. I wouldn't doubt if it would eat up all the stars in your tank. Be ready to supplement its diet with more star fish..

I had a couple small nickle sized brittles when I first set my reef up. They haven't reproduced at all though. Almost three years later, I still have three all about 6 inches in diameter..

 

Harlequin shrimp, like any critter that we keep in our tanks, hardly always act the same.

I know of folks that have tried them to eat asterina stars, and I don't know anyone personally that has had luck with that. They typically eat larger starfish, and typically leave serpent stars alone.

Basically, you maybe have a 50/50 shot at having harlequins actually eating these stars. The other 50% shot is the shrimp needing a special diet of starfish every couple of weeks.

Be prepared, it might work, or it might make more work for you.

 

If you want to control them, look at your feeding habits. They are simple scavengers. The population will only get as big as the available food allows.
Does you mandarin not eat them? Mine used to go nuts for the smaller ones.
But they are beneficial. I have been meaning to seed my tank with some for a while now. If you need to get rid of any more, I would love to send you my address

 

Shoot, if you weren't on the left coast I would say I'm comin by for a sack-o-stars!!!

 

what a great picture LG

some of them are a decent size also - the one on the extreme right
Wont you LFS take a few of your hands? people who set up tanks with base rock and dry sand for example are deprived to a degree of these usefull hitch hikers

Steve

 

Those things give me the heebee-geebees.