Bi-weekly Discussion of the week(s) Inverts

[tims]

Inverts make a great addition to our tanks.They are just one more thing to keep us mesmirized for hours .

What is an Invert?

what are some of the common Inverts we have in our tanks?

[reefBoyDc]

Anything that doesn't have a backbone is an invert. Pretty much everything we put in our tanks other than fish and corals is an invert, : crabs, shrimp, anemones, snails, clams, worms... They are great to watch, and many perform specific cleanup tasks.

[tims]

HAHAa.. good mike. i was wondering if that woudl have been caught.

since you were the frist.. you can pick an invert to start us off..

[reefBoyDc]

Lets start with...

CRABS!

[wharyat]

Nice topic Tim.

Hmmm...
Smaller hermit crabs are great for algae, uneaten food, and some detritus scavanging. Big ones like to eat anything they can.

The only other crab that I kept was an emerald mythrax; he was great at eating algae and such, never touched anything he wasn't supposed to.

All crabs are oppurtunistic feeders, meaning that they will eat anything that they think is edible, including living fish.

[Twitterbait]

I like crab... Just had a nice Crab stuffed Salmon Fillet. Tasty.

Cleaner hermits, Emerald Mythrix, and Sally lightfoot are the only real benificial crabs i have seen. there are a million different cleaner hermits so we may need to break off for them. the only other cool ones that i would add (or have added) for show are the pom pom crab and the anenome crab (very cool). these guys are pretty harmless and a cool show of two different organisms working together.

[tims]

Okay lets start off withthe "crabs" we know. ( other than hermits)


Can you give me a list of Crabs you have in your tank and Why?

we can hit hermits and shrimp and others down the line.

Sally light foot
mithrix
emerald green

[tims]

here is some nice reading.

Also i woudl like ot have Pictures of your crabs even if you are not sure what type it is.!

[dobejazz]

I have one Hitchhiker crab but the one and only time I saw it it ran when it saw me!! I've not seen it since. It was small (less than 1/4" )and beige completely blended in with my finger leather I only saw it when it started running.

[VWD]

The only ones I have are Blue legs. they seem to stay small. I don't have any picture right now.

[reefBoyDc]

I had a decorator crab once, and that was not a good idea. Awesome creature, but destructive. Everything in your tank is potential clothing for it. Definitely a no-go in a reef tank.

[reefBoyDc]

Hee's a pic of one of my blue-legs spawning in my tank. The fry, obviously, did not make it pas the fry stage.

Emerald mythrax carbs are said to eat bubble algae. How do they break the tough shell of the algae? And do the seeds get into the water column?

[dobejazz]

I forgot about my staghorn crab Sorry for the bad pic but he didn't live long enough for me to take a better one. He was very cool but I think my red and blue hermits Killed him he made it about a week. very bad impulse buy.

[reefBoyDc]

All I see is a devils's hand. But that makes me think of something: most crabs are very elusive. Besides their great taste, thats what I like most about them. You only get to see them when THEY want you to. I love that.

Also, you said he was short lived, and that makes me think of all the crabs that have "disappeared" in my tank.

[superwizbang]

Ah, but you must be careful of hitchiker crabs. After finding a couple empty snail shells laying around and one of my hermits in a new home (he went back to the LFS), I figured out the source. While getting ready for the tank change over, I pulled out all my rock because I had seen an unusual crab.

Low and behold, I had a hairy-legged crab, actually three, but the main one was larger than the end of your thumb to the first joint...in the thorax alone. Needless to say I was glad to catch him and he is now my new refugium watchdog. I could not bring myself to freeze him and my gf's little girl fell in love with him. I would be in deep water (pun intended) if she came over and he was not around for her to look at. 8/

On topic however, you must be really careful with which crabs you introduce to a reef as I read. Picked up 500+ inverts and probably 2/3rds are listed as being questionable or not reef safe. Make sure you read before you introduce them to your passive goby or pretty sun coral. You might find them gone, never to be found once more.

-K