Hermit crabs

7/15/04
To follow-up on last week’s episode about the sea cucumber, it seems healthy and happy. Since shedding its skin, it looks darker gray, and maybe bigger, but I can’t be sure about the bigger part, since these guys look way different depending on how stretched out they are.

I’ve lost another blue-green chromis (probably jumped, but can’t find a body). Down to four now... I bought some plastic grid that is used for lighting (they call it “egg crate”) with the thought of putting it on top of the tank, but I keep hesitating. It would be a real pain, not easy to get on and off, and I have my hands in there quite often (glass has to be cleaned daily, for example).

Last Monday, I had a really LONG day, leaving in the morning to go to Portland, then meeting fellow reef-club members in Waterville at 5:30 to car pool to Bangor to see the tanks of a member who definitely has caught the bug pretty bad--he has 7 tanks, and has only been doing this a year and a half. He sells his excess corals so I brought along a cooler to bring stuff home, just in case. I didn’t get back until 10pm.

As luck would have it, he had a few unusual colors of zooanthids. I currently have two colors: a green one with long tentacles and a brown with orange centers. Unlike many corals, these guys can mostly grow against each other without complaint, so if you mix colors, you get a nice “garden” as they merge. I bought a pink one of normal habit and an unusual multi-colored one with mixed green center and neon orange rim, small sized, on a branch of coral. To complete the garden, we need a lawn for contrast, so I bought a small piece of star polyp coral. This spreads all over the place, each polyp is thin and never gets tall, so it looks grass-like when it covers the rock (that will take a while, of course).

Finally, being a blue-lover, I had to get a blue ricordia. My existing ricordia is green. The blue one (3, actually, on the one rock) is very small.

I was very tempted by the hermit crabs. I have always thought these were neat, and he had a whole fleet of them, blue-legged and very interesting to watch. The local dealer, however, if VERY opposed to hermit crabs in a reef tank, saying that they kill fish and snails. One day when I was there right after she got a new shipment of blue-green chromis fish in and I was going to buy some, I noticed that half the fish were dead. When we examined the bodies, they had slash marks on them. The dealer said there had to be a hermit crab in there by accident, that they go after the fish at night while they are in the reef sleeping. She began picking up snail shells until she found one that had a crab in it and removed it. Contrary to this, all the books say hermit crabs (especially the blue-legged ones) are exemplary scavengers that do a great job of keeping the reef cleaned up. They claim that a hermit never kills a snail unless it needs to get a new shell and the aquarist has failed to provide any. So you just need to put a good selection of various sized shells (got plenty of those!) in the aquarium and the hermit will select what it needs as it grows and all will be well. Soooo, there I was in Bangor watching these cute little guys, and I saw a hermit side up to a snail, turn it over, and start clawing at it! Now I can’t say for sure there was a snail inside, but the snail in question had a much smaller shell than the one the hermit currently occupied, so he can’t have been looking for a new house, and in theory he wouldn’t be clawing at the snail if the shell were empty....This definitely gave me pause, and in the end I decided not to buy one, for now at any rate.