Hermit Crabs

[MasterBlaster]

A reefologist friend of mine swears up and down that hermit crabs won't eat 'pods, or bristleworms, thereby making them good cleaners for your refugium.

I don't think I agree with him. I've searched past threads and cannot seem to find a conclusive agreement on this.

Whats the latest thinking on this?

[Ninong]

I don't think they will eat pods either. They might eat some of the smaller wormy critters and microcrustaceans (smaller than copepods) in your sand bed but I doubt that they will eat bristle worms. They will eat algae and detritus and anything dead or dying and maybe even something not yet dead that happens to have a shell they covet.

They are probably not worth the potential trouble they might cause. I have 10 Scarlet Reef hermits that do not seem to be too bothersome right now but I also have about a dozen small so-called micro hermits from IPSF that are not all that well behaved and a few of them have grown considerably since I got them five weeks ago. I would hate to have a few dozen of the little monsters in my tank. I got the Scarlets because I like the looks of them and wanted to try a few. I got the micro hermits because they came in a package deal from IPSF and they were supposed to stay small and not cause problems. Wrong! At least a couple of them are now 1/2" across. They were all about 1/4" when I first got them. And the two that are 1/2" across are sporting new snail shells that belonged to snails that were alive a couple of weeks ago.

[MasterBlaster]

Would starfish/brittlestars be better substitutes?

[Poseidon]

I second Ninong the hermits are a BAD idea, unless you like buying lots of Snails....

I even had some "dwarf" hermits that grew to better then an inch across and they are sporting some Mexican turbo snail shells with are huge and the hermits fit just fine... so they became pretty aggressive predators

[Ninong]

Would starfish/brittlestars be better substitutes?

Snails are probably a closer substitute for hermits when it comes to what each of them eats, etc. Sea stars are valuable provided you avoid all of the bad ones. Most of them fall into the bad category. The really tiny little brittle stars are great. I would avoid the white sand sifting star because it will eat your sand bed infauna and I would definitely avoid the Atlantic green brittle star because it is predatory on virtually everything in the tank if it is large enough and hungry enough.

The safe genera are Fromia and Linckia. Good ones to try would be F. elegans, F. indica, F. monilis, L. multifora and *possibly* L. laevigata if your tank is large enough for one and if you can get a healthy one locally that has been around for a few weeks. All of those species eat mostly film algae, surface microbes and detritus. They are harmless in a reeftank unless they physically annoy something.

A lot of the serpent/brittlestars that are available are iffy in reeftanks. You need to know what you are getting and most LFS have no clue what they are getting and it is hard to I.D. some of these things looking through the glass at the LFS. By all means avoid Choc. Chips as they are corallivores.

[zhenya]

I don't know if much could be added to what Ninong had said already
i would however like to add my vote to NAY to hermits. I think most if not all of them are opportunistic and I don't trust them at all. Adding diffrent types of snails is much better way to deal with detritus or algae.
I don't know if you visited this website but I'll post a link to it incase you missed it , if you are interested in starfish it is a great read...
http://home.att.net/~ophiuroid/html/main.html

PS.Forgot to add that adding a sand cukes helps as well to keep clean substarate,sand in this case of course ;)

[Samper]

In my nano, I have one blue legged hermit and one red legged, also an emerald green crab and some small brown crab that I can never seem to see long enough to see details. From what I can tell he either has black or brown tips on his pinchers. I have read that this last crab I mentioned could possibly be bad news. Lately I have noticed that a few of my yellow polyps are missing. Who might the culprit be?

[zhenya]

I can almost guarantee that it is not the hermit crabs, they mostly go after snails and such,that brown crab you mentioned could be the one. I'd check out your tank when the lights are out,use a flashlight with some red paper or tape in front of it.

[Samper]

I have one of those army flashlights with the different colored lenses, I'll use that. From what I've seen he is pretty small, dime size at most but he is quick and it seems that when I blink he's gone. Ill get the sucker though if he is the culprit.