MirrorMaker Heartbeats Keep Getting Replicated

I’m trying to replicate between a cluster I own and an external cluster which I have less control over in both directions.

A behaviour I’m seeing is that heartbeat topics keep being created exponentially every time I restart the MirrorMaker.

I have greater control over my own cluster so I was able to recreate the entire cluster, but for the external cluster I am able to delete the topics, excluding the heartbeats topic. Could this be the root cause?