Tiger tail sea cucumber and hermit crabs?

[Travismc]

Hey guys, I just added a tiger tail cucumber to my tank, and the hermit crabs just wont leave him alone, they keep crawling ontop of him and pinching him, are they compatible?

[Ninong]

Maybe the hermit crabs found something tasty to eat on him? My hermit crabs never caused any problems for my holothurians. They caused problems for my snails by murdering them, sometimes for their shells and sometimes just for fun, and they caused problems for the spaghetti worms in the sand bed by eating their buccal tentacles, and they caused problems for lots of other stuff just by climbing all over them but my cukes didn't seem to mind them.

[metalhead]

Maybe the hermit crabs found something tasty to eat on him? My hermit crabs never caused any problems for my holothurians. They caused problems for my snails by murdering them, sometimes for their shells and sometimes just for fun, and they caused problems for the spaghetti worms in the sand bed by eating their buccal tentacles, and they caused problems for lots of other stuff just by climbing all over them but my cukes didn't seem to mind them.

Ninong, were you keeping any certain variety of hermits or do you think it matters? I know from my experience that the red-legs seem to be the least aggressive and cause fewer problems with snails than the blue-legs for some reason. For all I know though there could be hundreds of different species of each and I know "red and blue" is a bit general but just wondering what your experience was in regard. I did mess up one time and acquire some "hawaiian reef hermits", man were those things destructive... I didn't have a snail one left after the first month!

[Ninong]

I ordered a dozen scarlet reef hermits (Paguristes cadenati) because I thought they were cute. They're the ones with the bright red legs and the yellow-gold eye stalks. In retrospect, I think three or four would have been more than enough cuteness to go around.

Those came from Reeftopia.com in the Florida Keys. I actually did like them and they were reasonably well-behaved but they do eat things other than just nuisance algae. It's just what they do for a living. I can't say that I ever witnessed any of the scarlets attacking a snail but I did witness more than one of the Hawaiian micro reef hermits murdering a snail. I received a dozen of those little terrorists as lagniappe in an order from IPSF. I didn't order them or pay for them. I was told that they were completely harmless and would remain tiny, which is why IPSF calls them micro hermits.

Well, they didn't stay micro for long. Within a few months they were all at least an inch across. I removed every one of them from my tank but that took a few weeks because you have to wait until you spot one in a location where you can get at it.

I have heard that the scarlets are not as good as the blue-legged hermits for dealing with nuisance algae but I never did have any green nuisance algae anyway, so I wouldn't know. All I ever had was a bad case of nasty red turf algae that took me at least ten months to eliminate. I still don't know for sure how I managed to do that. The scarlets are reported to be the least destructive of all the hermits and I consider them to be extremely attractive.

After my experience with those nasty hermits from Hawaii, I'm not a fan of hermit crabs. Maybe a few but that's it. Hermit crabs will consume the microfauna that inhabits the top layer of your sand bed and they will feast on the microcrustaceans that comprise the epifauna on your live rock. Too many of them and you won't have enough left for your much more valuable zooplanktivorous fish, such as the many reef aquarium-safe wrasses and dottybacks.

It's all about balance and deciding what you are willing to tolerate. I guess I'm just not willing to tolerate too many hermit crabs. Two or three or so would be nice if they're colorful and reasonably well-behaved.