Cleaning Crew

[villanueva]

Hey, some help for an aquarium noob please.

What kind of a roster should I put together to form a cleaning crew? Right now my biggest issue is with algae or moss growing ontop of my live rock. What's the best critter(s) to get rid of that? as well as any other kind of critter I should keep?

thanks

[Bigred0942]

Are you talking about hair algae?? It is green and looks like hair. If thats what you have I recomend turbo smails. I had a very bad infestation myself, and I bought three for my 55 gallon, and within 48 hours it was all gone

[Nikki]

If you have a good LFS you can probably pick up a CUC there, but I didn't have a lot of choices so I went with an on-line source. I bought the janitor crew from garf.org and was very pleased with the results. I had a large diatom problem and some other algaes as well. After a few weeks my tank was as clean as could be! Their web-site is a little hard to navigate so use the left hand menus and click on algae control and then choose the kind you want to clean up. I had the diatom bloom and they sent me cerith and nerite snails that did a great job!

One thing I have wondered about though is that I got snails and hermit crabs, and later discovered the hermits eat the snails for the shells. The hermits definitely made a big dent in cleaning up the sand bed and rock though so I still haven't figured out what most people do ... just keep adding snails?

Happy hunting!

[tray262]

I've gone thru about 100+ snail in a 2 years, So I've slowly removed the crabs, I'm going to try and go without them.