Killing Asterina stars

[asylumdown]

My display tank currently has zero asterina stars. My live rock came straight from the frieght plane from fiji in to my tank (never touched a holding tank), and I've never introduced any further outside sources of rock to my tank specifically to avoid unwanted hitch-hikers. I break all frags off whatever bases they come on, and the limited LPS I have are all smooth skeleton species that I was easily able to inspect and scrape clean of anything I didn't want.

I'd like to keep my tank free of asterina stars, but I picked up an acans frag last week that's fused to a reasonable size of live rock. The tank it came out of had both asterina stars and flatworms, and now in my coral quarantine tank (it's the only thing in there) I have seen a couple of both species walking across the glass. I've got flatworm exit here to take care of the flatworms, but the rock is too porous and convoluted to trust that I could for sure remove all of the starfish, so I'm wondering if anybody knows of a dip or solution that will kill the asterinas without harming the coral? Ultimately I'd like to cut away most of the rock the acans are on, but it's too dense to cut with any of the tools I have.

[liz]

try a hammer and chisel to break the rock??

[asylumdown]

I started to do that when I got it home, but the rock is shaped so oddly I was afraid of damaging the coral.

[FitoPharmer]

There are harlequin and other type of shirmp that prey on them.

[asylumdown]

yah, i looked in to those, but this is a tiny little 5 gallon pico tank that I use to quarantine corals, I empty it out when I'm not using it, so I don't really want to invest in an animal that I would then need to care for/do something with. There's nothing in my big tank to feed a harlequin shrimp and there's not enough of the stars in the QT tank to justify buying one.

I'm more wondering if there's something chemical that I can do as a dip, as I'm trying to avoid this from becoming an ongoing problem that requires biological control. I will sterilize the QT tank when I'm done, I just want to make sure there's none on the coral.

[FitoPharmer]

have you tired revive or coral rx?

[reefwars]

Bring the acan rock to me ill cut the rock away for you with my diamond blade

[mrhasan]

I would dip the whole rock in concentrated lemon juice, making sure that the coral doesn't get touched by that. It will literally burn every possible hitch hiker within secs!

[Delphinus]

Asterinas are reasonably harmless .. flatworms on the other hand yeah I could see you not wanting them..