100s of Brittle Stars
 

I joined recently and have been learning lots from what I've read, so thank you everyone for sharing..........it will show to be a great benefit to me.
I've had an incident a month ago where my stepson's friend was sleep walking and accidentily fed my tank a whole container of fish food..............not good, lots of death- total mayhem. My clown fish, hermits and snails and corals survived :neutral: Just getting confident all is alright to add anew I have, it seems, billions of brittle stars. Everything I read is that they are pretty much- a good thing. But all my live rock has little legs scworming out of every crack! Does anyone have any info or suggestions on how to get them under control. I"m not to impressed with the look :redface:
Thanks for your imput in advance, I look forward to getting these &%$^#%^*s under control !

The environment will keep them under control. In other words, they are thriving now because there is a lot of available food floating about the tank. Once that food is exhausted or taken away via water changes, their numbers will die back.

Maybe not billions but I got lots as well, but they're harmless.

It's going to similar to algae blooms, keep the nutrients low to keep under control.

I at one time in the years had a bunch of rock was infested with them. They were in every rock. So I dipped each rock in cold freshwater and shook them out. I didn't realize how clean they really did keep my tanks over the years. Now I NEED some in my tanks. Wished I didn't do that to my live rock years back. They may not look good. But they do serve a really good purpose, especially when your tank had a food overload.


Hope thats helps.

Keep in mind, Once all the food is removed you will have a bunch of death bristle Stars... Make sure you remove ASAP unless you like NH3 Spikes :D

you could add a harlequin shrimp. They eat sea stars.
http://saltaquarium.about.com/cs/inv...hautharshr.htm

Harlequin shrimp only eat the tube feet of sea stars and those mini-brittles are too small for the pincers of harlequins. They're still cool to have though, but you'd have to feed them a much larger sea star (like a sand sifter or linkia or something).