lettuce nudibranch

[xtopher]

anyone keep one? good or bad?

[Twitterbait]

I'll be ridin this thread, i want to know what they are good at eating.

[xtopher]

I guess they are spose to take care of hair algae and bryopsis, not too sure if they pick on corals or not just trying to find someone who has had one

[Cosine]

I had one for awhile.... I hear they only live for one year... mine slowly shrunk over time til he was gone... personally I'd pass on one it never seemed to eat any algae. But perhaps I didn't have the right kind of algae or my tank wasn't mature enough

curious of how others did

[nam2212]

My LFS carries them from time to time. They told me that they have never seen one eat hair algae. If you get one, be sure to cover all intakes. They are bad about getting torn to pieces in them.

[tims]

Depends on exactly which one you are talking about.
read this
more

about half way down

a few to stay away from
Elysia crispata

[Loverotties]

They don't live long.

[skeety]

From the research I've done...apperantly, marine biologists are still not quite sure what Nudibranch's eat/need to survive. As a result, in captivity, they live an average of 4-6 months. But only because it takes them that long to starve to death.

They also have the ability to stretch/fold/bend such that there is almost no hole/crevis to small for them to ooze into. As a result, most of these critters meet their demise (in captivity) by crawling into your overflow/powerhead/CLS intakes/etc.

I know they are beautiful and very fascinating...but I strongly urge you to resist. maybe in time, when more is known, we can keep these creatures. But in the mean time, I hope we avoid them, and not encourage the LFS's to carry these critters until then.

just my take on them....

[VWD]

They do look cool, But I agree on the very short life span.

[jagt48]

I was under the impression that they eat flora and incorporate the chloroplasts into their body and use it to photosynthetically make some of their food. I have had a couple and I agree that they don't live long, maybe a few months if they don't get sucked up into some filter or powerhead intake. I have a friend who had a terrible hair algae problem (I'm talking at least 1-3 inches over all of his 15 lbs of LR in a 10 gallon tank)and he got a couple of these and now almost all of the hair algae is gone in a matter of about 2-4 weeks. I can't say for sure if it was the nudibranches, but he put two pretty good sized ones in there just about the time the algae started to subside.



Joseph

[Twitterbait]

thanks for the article tims very interesting

[tims]