A Few Qs
- Thread starter weezawoo
- Start date
TheHolding
Fish Crazy
It came from a footy player (Wilson Palacios) as a Spurs fan Palacios is a bit of a bruiser and likes to get booked every now and then for kicking people around the pitch.
Suits the fish really as he is a bit of an animal at times, he has bitten me a on a few occasions when cleaning the tank.
His beak is very sharp and has drawn blood before, little git!
Suits the fish really as he is a bit of an animal at times, he has bitten me a on a few occasions when cleaning the tank.
His beak is very sharp and has drawn blood before, little git!
OP
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weezawoo
Fish Gatherer
its 6 foot around 380l in tank and then 200l sump, well say 100l as running half full atm!
I think its a good idea, will be great to see the progress in the frags!
ooooo that doesn't sound good
I think its a good idea, will be great to see the progress in the frags!
ooooo that doesn't sound good
Tank volume...?
Cucumbers?! Frankly these should never be considered CUC. They don't "clean" things as is typical of CUC animals (namely snails and hermits, rarely urchins for coralline) and you have to have pristine water and lots of filter food in it. Ornamental additions to some tanks perhaps, but the most they are ever going to do in the average tank is starve or get injured and nuke it. If you plan to put fish in this tank, make sure you get an absolutely certain ID on it to know what you're dealing with toxin-wise.
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weezawoo
Fish Gatherer
Thanks Donya! I don't like the sea cucumbers, this was a reccommedation from someone on what they thought I should have. Total volume is around 500l inc sump, 380l ish for main tank.
TheHolding
Fish Crazy
This reminds me of my puffer -
http
/www.youtube.com/watch?nomobile=1&v=rLMby_JcNb0
Idiot Diver 0 - 1 Porcupine Puffer
http
/www.youtube.com/watch?nomobile=1&v=rLMby_JcNb0Idiot Diver 0 - 1 Porcupine Puffer
OP
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weezawoo
Fish Gatherer
Oh I have just added my sand! Love the sand I have,its nice and light, looks much better with sand! But I broke the light in the process so am now light less until I can rig up my other T8 unit tomorrow for a bit!
Wow bet that taught him a lesson or 2!
This reminds me of my puffer -
http
Idiot Diver 0 - 1 Porcupine Puffer
Wow bet that taught him a lesson or 2!
Unless you're planning on putting them in the sump too, it sounds like whoever recommended 100-120 hermits is recommending based on 1 hermit per gallon, which is doomed to massively overstock all but a very few special cases. Although I have never had a tank that big (only half that currently), I would be surprised if you need half the quoted number, particularly if you have a diverse CUC. Depends a lot on which species you get too. More small Clibanarius will go into that system than would be the case for larger hermits like the Calcinus species. Whichever species you go with, start well under whatever you think you'll need and watch for a while. Observation is worth far more than any stocking guesses.
I'm not usually this blunt, but people who throw around that kind of "advice" really make me angry. Recommending sea cucumbers (especially in the plural) to most hobbyists is essentially recommending a high risk (sometimes a certainty) of massive loss of money and livestock. I have to assume that this person is either a bit of an unethical salesman interested in selling you cucumbers or someone who really hasn't done enough reading on inverts to make sound/safe recommendations. This type of suggestion is a good example of why it's important to have a good stock of trusted references against which to check anything someone spouts out before giving any further thought to it. Lots of people and websites pull stupid ideas out of their you-know-whats and happily spread it around. Experience eventually makes it easy to tell who's a quack, but before then you really have to be defensive about who/what you take advice from. Books are often a good baseline to use against this sort of thing (although not foolproof, as they can be out dated), so if you aren't already accumulating a small library, I would recommend doing so. Even then, read critically - I have one invert reference that says something like "good reef animal" to one type of cucumber and then farther down notes that it will nuke your tank with holothurin toxin if hermits pester it.
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weezawoo
Fish Gatherer
No worries on being blunt, I really appreciate the help! Actually the guy who said about it is from another forum I couldn't believe he was advising to get so many as all I can imagine is just seeing this mass of hermits, even in a tank my size. I am finding it hard to figure how many I will need so I guess I will play it by ear.
To start with how many should I get,would say 5 be ok until I need more or a higher number? I can easily buy more when needed.
I was looking to get Halloween hermits as I love their legs. Do I have to keep to one type in my tank? I see some people sticking to one and other mixing red legged and blue legged hermits together which some say can't be done.
Do you know of a good reliable website for researching CUC?
Thanks!
I haven't got any books at all at the moment, there are so many I wouldn't know which would be good to trust!
To start with how many should I get,would say 5 be ok until I need more or a higher number? I can easily buy more when needed.
I was looking to get Halloween hermits as I love their legs. Do I have to keep to one type in my tank? I see some people sticking to one and other mixing red legged and blue legged hermits together which some say can't be done.
Do you know of a good reliable website for researching CUC?
Thanks!
I haven't got any books at all at the moment, there are so many I wouldn't know which would be good to trust!
Well...this turned into more of a text wall than I originally intended. Sometimes I don't notice how long I've been standing on the soapbox until I hit the preview button. 
That's a good safe way to do it. Once you see the rate the CUC handles things like diatoms (those are a rreally easy way to see how much of the rockwork gets covered over a few days) then you can keep adding in incremets until things balance out. Five at a time is probably an ok rate for small or medium species. My gut feeling is that 50 is an upper bound on small/medium hermits, so if the CUC is built up uniformly over time and you did five hermits at a time, you'd at most be doing 10 incremental additions - which is really quite reasonable for a tank that large given how long it's going to take everything to settle out and stabilize.
The bigger the tank the less risk there is with mixing species, although obviously I don't recommend trying to collect every single type on the market. In a nano or smaller I would say you really need to pick one (or limit to small Clibanarius species - will get to that in a minute). In a tank of the size you're working with the game is quite a bit different, so about all I can say is try it and be ready to yank some out if it goes south. Slow stocking is the safest way to test these sorts of things.
First step to clarity: do away with common names. If people referred to fish with the same degree of sloppyness as is the case for hermits, we'd be putting tangs in nanos left right and center and blame failures on the fish being unpredictable. There are 2-3 main species that commonly are called "red leg" hermits: Clibanarius digueti/erythropus and Paguristes cadenati. "Blue leg" hermits are Clibanarius tricolor (except when they're juvenile blue form Calcinus elegans! But we'll ignore that for now). The two other Clibanarius species are also sometimes called "red tip" hermits when sold alongside P. cadenati, which is usually the "red leg" in that case.
I can tell you from my own experience that Clibanarius digueti and C. tricolor can get along. I tested this in my own tanks. They are both small Clibanarius species with the same behaviors, the maximum sizes are all around the same, and about the worst that happens is that they forage in same-species clumps and it has a bit of and east-side/west-side hermit gang look. They will go up to each other and do little arm flexes like muscle men showing off, but that's about the extent of it as long as there are LOTS of shells and plenty of food to go around.
P. cadenati and Clibanarius tricolor is another issue. I have never kept these two together myself, but there are two things I notice:
- The majority of people I've heard/read complaining about hermit wars are keeping these species together.
- The more savvy LFSs I visit always seem to make an effort to mostly seperate these species. The seperated cases seem pretty normal while combined cases I've seen have looked a bit rough (lots of individuals missing limbs, etc.)
Both just observations and not something I have tested myself, but my current hypothesis is that there is a problem with those two, particularly in small tanks. As for why some say it's possible to keep them together successfully, I first have to wonder which "red leg" they're talking about and then have to wonder about other factors like tank size (bigger will be less stressful on the hermits) and how success is defined. Some people think that success has been reached when they're replacing hermits every couple of months due to attrition.
Now, back to the "Halloween hermits", which are Ciliopagurus strigatus (except when they're the orange form of Calcinus elegans! But we'll ignore that for now). There are a few reasons I wouldn't recommend these hermits for stocking a large tank exclusively.
- They need REALLY specific shells and these shells are hard to find.
- Some individuals can be a bit rough towards softies.
- Seems not as great a track record in captivity as other species like the small Clibanarius. Basically they are just more fragile animals. I once had a Clibanarius digueti end up in an ice cold tub of stagnant muck for over a week and it came out fine and lived for another three years; Ciliopagurus hermits just don't seem bomb proof to the same degree as that.
If you want colorful hermits, another suggestion I would have is Calcinus elegans (blue and orange forms). They are much easier to find shells for, although they get larger than the hermits most people stock for CUC so large animal precautions apply. On the other hand, if you happen to have a bumper crop of cone snail shells of appropriate sizes at your disposal and are willing to treat the hermits as a bit of a fragile CUC member, I don't see anything wrong there. I actually have a third, less serious reason for not recommending these hermits though: I've never seen them at a price comparable to other species, so at $10+ a pop in my area, stocking lots of them would require awfully deep pockets!
Offhand I can't think of any that really stand out but if I can remember any I'll post it back here. Generally the web has struck me as a pretty bad place for getting invert info though. For hermits especially there is a lot of nonsense out there, and tons of incorrectly IDed photos that makes it even more confusing. That has been one of my main motivations for putting together my own 60+ page document on those animals. As for other CUC animals I'm not sure either, as I really only go to photo databases to do species IDs. Beyond that I tend to hit the books and go digging through journal articles.
Somewhere around here there's a "realm of knowledge" thread with book reviews and such. Not sure where that's gotten too or if it was stickied but it's around.
That's a good safe way to do it. Once you see the rate the CUC handles things like diatoms (those are a rreally easy way to see how much of the rockwork gets covered over a few days) then you can keep adding in incremets until things balance out. Five at a time is probably an ok rate for small or medium species. My gut feeling is that 50 is an upper bound on small/medium hermits, so if the CUC is built up uniformly over time and you did five hermits at a time, you'd at most be doing 10 incremental additions - which is really quite reasonable for a tank that large given how long it's going to take everything to settle out and stabilize.
The bigger the tank the less risk there is with mixing species, although obviously I don't recommend trying to collect every single type on the market. In a nano or smaller I would say you really need to pick one (or limit to small Clibanarius species - will get to that in a minute). In a tank of the size you're working with the game is quite a bit different, so about all I can say is try it and be ready to yank some out if it goes south. Slow stocking is the safest way to test these sorts of things.
First step to clarity: do away with common names. If people referred to fish with the same degree of sloppyness as is the case for hermits, we'd be putting tangs in nanos left right and center and blame failures on the fish being unpredictable. There are 2-3 main species that commonly are called "red leg" hermits: Clibanarius digueti/erythropus and Paguristes cadenati. "Blue leg" hermits are Clibanarius tricolor (except when they're juvenile blue form Calcinus elegans! But we'll ignore that for now). The two other Clibanarius species are also sometimes called "red tip" hermits when sold alongside P. cadenati, which is usually the "red leg" in that case.
I can tell you from my own experience that Clibanarius digueti and C. tricolor can get along. I tested this in my own tanks. They are both small Clibanarius species with the same behaviors, the maximum sizes are all around the same, and about the worst that happens is that they forage in same-species clumps and it has a bit of and east-side/west-side hermit gang look. They will go up to each other and do little arm flexes like muscle men showing off, but that's about the extent of it as long as there are LOTS of shells and plenty of food to go around.
P. cadenati and Clibanarius tricolor is another issue. I have never kept these two together myself, but there are two things I notice:
- The majority of people I've heard/read complaining about hermit wars are keeping these species together.
- The more savvy LFSs I visit always seem to make an effort to mostly seperate these species. The seperated cases seem pretty normal while combined cases I've seen have looked a bit rough (lots of individuals missing limbs, etc.)
Both just observations and not something I have tested myself, but my current hypothesis is that there is a problem with those two, particularly in small tanks. As for why some say it's possible to keep them together successfully, I first have to wonder which "red leg" they're talking about and then have to wonder about other factors like tank size (bigger will be less stressful on the hermits) and how success is defined. Some people think that success has been reached when they're replacing hermits every couple of months due to attrition.
Now, back to the "Halloween hermits", which are Ciliopagurus strigatus (except when they're the orange form of Calcinus elegans! But we'll ignore that for now). There are a few reasons I wouldn't recommend these hermits for stocking a large tank exclusively.
- They need REALLY specific shells and these shells are hard to find.
- Some individuals can be a bit rough towards softies.
- Seems not as great a track record in captivity as other species like the small Clibanarius. Basically they are just more fragile animals. I once had a Clibanarius digueti end up in an ice cold tub of stagnant muck for over a week and it came out fine and lived for another three years; Ciliopagurus hermits just don't seem bomb proof to the same degree as that.
If you want colorful hermits, another suggestion I would have is Calcinus elegans (blue and orange forms). They are much easier to find shells for, although they get larger than the hermits most people stock for CUC so large animal precautions apply. On the other hand, if you happen to have a bumper crop of cone snail shells of appropriate sizes at your disposal and are willing to treat the hermits as a bit of a fragile CUC member, I don't see anything wrong there. I actually have a third, less serious reason for not recommending these hermits though: I've never seen them at a price comparable to other species, so at $10+ a pop in my area, stocking lots of them would require awfully deep pockets!
Offhand I can't think of any that really stand out but if I can remember any I'll post it back here. Generally the web has struck me as a pretty bad place for getting invert info though. For hermits especially there is a lot of nonsense out there, and tons of incorrectly IDed photos that makes it even more confusing. That has been one of my main motivations for putting together my own 60+ page document on those animals. As for other CUC animals I'm not sure either, as I really only go to photo databases to do species IDs. Beyond that I tend to hit the books and go digging through journal articles.
Somewhere around here there's a "realm of knowledge" thread with book reviews and such. Not sure where that's gotten too or if it was stickied but it's around.
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weezawoo
Fish Gatherer
Wow i wake up, check the forum on my way to work and see this 
thank you for what im sure is a great reply! I will get more out of it if i read it when i am home rather than my phone!
Just so u dont think im ignoring it!
thank you for what im sure is a great reply! I will get more out of it if i read it when i am home rather than my phone!
Just so u dont think im ignoring it!
HappyGeorge
Fish Herder
I have been having the same trouble getting possitive id's on hermits and snails. I do use this for LR stuff and snails, but sure Donya will tell me if it's any good.Hitch Hiker guide
That CUC looks well over the top though, as well as including some seriously dubious options. Most of my CUC are inherited with my LR from tank breakdowns but my 3ft Reef has a mix of small blue legs, red legs and haloweens and haven't come across any empty shells yet (except the ones I added, some of which have been used) and don't see any fights. I do keep the small nassarius snails in the sand bed and turbos for the glass but if you wanted to avoid them Weez there are other otpions, if you kept a Chalk Goby or a sand sifting star would certainly help sift the sand and an algae blenny will help you with algae on the glass.
In my 5ft I won't have snails as some of the fish I am planning on will quickly get rid of them, it does have a strange collection of hermits though (inherited). There is a large blue knuckle, a few other large hermits that I can't id, small red legs and some black and white legged ones that again I can't id. I can't believe they haven't killed each other but seem to be fine.
That CUC looks well over the top though, as well as including some seriously dubious options. Most of my CUC are inherited with my LR from tank breakdowns but my 3ft Reef has a mix of small blue legs, red legs and haloweens and haven't come across any empty shells yet (except the ones I added, some of which have been used) and don't see any fights. I do keep the small nassarius snails in the sand bed and turbos for the glass but if you wanted to avoid them Weez there are other otpions, if you kept a Chalk Goby or a sand sifting star would certainly help sift the sand and an algae blenny will help you with algae on the glass.
In my 5ft I won't have snails as some of the fish I am planning on will quickly get rid of them, it does have a strange collection of hermits though (inherited). There is a large blue knuckle, a few other large hermits that I can't id, small red legs and some black and white legged ones that again I can't id. I can't believe they haven't killed each other but seem to be fine.
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weezawoo
Fish Gatherer
Thats good to know someone else thinks you don't need snails
I was thinking of a chalk Goby but was advised they don't last very long really in some tanks. I haven't even looked at Blennies so will check them out when I get home!
I was actually going to PM you about some frags someone directed me your way haha
I was thinking of a chalk Goby but was advised they don't last very long really in some tanks. I haven't even looked at Blennies so will check them out when I get home!
I was actually going to PM you about some frags
someone directed me your way haha
HappyGeorge
Fish Herder
Thats good to know someone else thinks you don't need snails
I was thinking of a chalk Goby but was advised they don't last very long really in some tanks. I haven't even looked at Blennies so will check them out when I get home!
I was actually going to PM you about some frags
The algae blenny is the star of my tank, everyone comments on him, despite his fairly bland colouring, almost permanently perched looking up over the edge of the tank, and leaves little kiss marks all over the glass and back of tank. As for the Goby I've never heard about them wasting away, mine was in my nano and appears to be pretty happy in my Reef tank, sifts sand all day long and ensures that paired with the undertow of the mp40 that my water is never clear.
Yeah I can sort a rockful of Xenia frags, which reminds me I have someone waiting for some already. Been so busy just not been on here at all, will make ammends tonight with pics of my new fish etc
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