crabs from the belt parkway

[Ariel110G]

so I got white leg small crabs from the water off the belt parkway, can I add them to my reef tank

 

[arnaldolex]

i got about about 30 hermit crabs from city island and they doing great in my tank only thing is your taking a risk of them eating your corals

 

[Dan_P]

I might risk putting local hermit crabs in a reef aquarium but not any other crab.

My recent experience with keeping a Long Island Sound tidal zone aquarium gave me new respect for crabs.

They are always hungry and are very quick at grabbing anything they think is food.

Crabs are also very good at digging and moving rocks, even the granite stones
I collected from the Sound. I imagine they could do quite a bit of unwanted aquascaping over night while rummaging for food in a reef aquarium.

While I only have circumstantial evidence, I think they killed my pipefish and large hermit crab.

So to be on the safe side, I returned my crabs to the original site from which I collected them in May.

 

[MrBanGa]

I added just last week 25 hermit crabs from manhattan beach & 20 snails they haven't touch my zoas /mushrooms/Duncan/torch/bubbleCoral it still might be too soon to tell but nothing yet

 

[Ariel110G]

well with the black snails from the belt parkway waters I have grate experience with, I got some last year and they are a great CC for my tank, now with the crabs that I got today I'm not so sure, they are small and white legs,

 

[reefer4eva]

Are they hermit crabs? If so I had them in my tank years ago..fast little critters..lmao..they only stayed on the sandbed and never climbed a single rock but my sandbed never looked so clean!

 

[ReefLord]

i thought they don't clean and just contribute to the bioload of the tank...

 

[Dan_P]

well with the black snails from the belt parkway waters I have grate experience with, I got some last year and they are a great CC for my tank, now with the crabs that I got today I'm not so sure, they are small and white legs,

The small black snails, if they are the same that infest the beaches in Norwalk, are mud snails. I read about them on the Internet and these sources claim that they can carry swimmers itch. This concerned me just enough not to load the tank with them. I have a dozen.

An interesting thing about these snails is that they consume meat. When I feed my critters frozen mysis shrimp, krill or bits of raw shrimp, the mud snails leave the glass and stream across the sand. I have seen a few get lucky and find and ingest mysis shrimp, that is if a hermit crab or grass shrimp does not grab it from them.

 

[Dan_P]

i thought they don't clean and just contribute to the bioload of the tank...

Yes, hermit crabs and snails increase the bioload. On the positive side, these creatures eat left over food and algae.

The hermits I collected from the Sound sift the sand looking for food and keep the beach sand bottom in my aquarium spotless, even cyanobacteria free. I have one very large hermit that is a major "earth mover", sifting a tablespoon of sand in less than a minute. The little hermit crabs sift much smaller qualities of sand. I don't know how well hermit crabs can sift the larger particle sand found in reef aquariums but they certainly will pick out food bits.

If you don't provide food to the aquarium, I am not sure how many hermit crabs can thrive or survive in a very clean reef tank. I could imagine them starving. I have not found any guidelines on how to estimate the number an aquarium can support. I don't have this issue because I feed the hermit crabs in my aquarium. In fact, I feed them enough that they molt and reproduce. Hermit crab sex looks violent.

 

[jackson6745]

I have 100 of the small black snails from the beach in my reef and 24 ick free fish, so I don't believe that they cause disease. They're behavior is similar to a nassarius snail. They don't do much until feeding time, then they scour the sandbed for scraps.

 

[Waleedwale1]

At the plum beach right off the belt parkway with reef lord aka diatomlord
Ton of what looks like red garcellia and sea lettuce

But no snails or crabs