Is This Ideal?

[lawrie]

i read in a marine reef guide book today that its ok to keep 1 hermit crab per gallon, so for example would it be safe to keep 12 hermits in my nano? not that i would want 12 hermits ofcourse!

 

[Musho3210]

no, you should only get what you need, not by buying a lot and watching them die until you get the right number, but buying a little and getting a little more when needed. 6 blue legged in my 20 gallon tank...

 

[Lynden]

4 zebras in my 33; though I do plan to get more.

 

[xxBarneyxx]

Yeah I have read in a lot of places the 1 crab/snail per X gallons rule but would agree that it is much better to get less then you think you want and then build them up over time.

 

[Tommy Gun]

I agree...less is more in many cases, so I concur with adding a few hermits at a time rather than in bulk for a couple of reasons such as the fact/idea that not all hermits are created equally so the number of hermits that you might need can differ for those reasons. My personal experience with the blue-legged hermits is that that tend to be more aggressive...in fact, I am still trying to catch a few of them so I can trade them for Scarlet-Reef hermits (which I prefer, but, of course, that is just an opinion).

Another great 'case' for adding a limited number of hermits is that, in many cases, if not provided with larger shells and/or enough food, there is a risk that they will become a threat to your snails, if any (this has been an issue for me lately). Of course, my reasoning for bringing this up is that, when a large number of hermits are present, it can be somewhat 'tricky' to keep track of them all - hence it is hard to know if you have added enough shells and/or food for them.

Lastly, I would think that the amount of live rock that you have in your tank would play some part in the number of hermits that would be best to keep. For example, I have about 200 pounds of live rock in my tank right now, and have added a grand total of 50 hermits (which I why I am still finding some of the blue-legged versions versus the scarlets) - although, I doubt that I still have 50 of them because, like I mentioned before, they are hard to keep track of and when I try to count, they refuse to sit still!

In any case, I can see a serious flaw in the 'one hermit per gallon' rule/guideline since that would mean I should have around 125 of them in my reef tank and like I eluded to, even though I have less than half that amount, I am having problems with my hermits resorting to what may be 'drastic measures' in order to survive. Besides, you can easily find the same benifits a hermit can provide within other clean-up crew type livestock...so perhaps keeping a few smaller hermits (trading them when they grow larger, if possible) with some other type(s) of livestock would be an option to look into. Generally speaking and within reasons, clean-up crew members are not a huge factor when trying to avoid overstocking from a bioload point of view so if that rule is trustworthy, I believe it was created under the premise of not having a bunch of starving hermits in a tank rather than under the same premise of the similar "inch of fish per X-number of gallons" (which, for the record, is also far from being perfect IMHO).