My First and New Clam!

C

CrazyLionfish

New member
Despite my lionfish being sick in my 75 gallon FOWLR, I decided to treat myself to something I never had before, a clam! I believe it is a 1st grade crocea. About 4 inches length. Acclimated it for about 40 minutes by drip acclimation and cleared a nice spot in the middle under the 150 watt metal halide for it. It was about half way open in that spot when sitting upright, now about an hour later it is on its' side and out fully. My peppermint shrimp has been investigating it, they are so skittish that one of them slowly creeped up to it and the clam closed and man did the shrimp run for it :lol:

Anything I need to do for it besides feed it phytoplankton every 2-3 days?
 
put a flat piece of rock underneath the clam and stablize it for a few days until it attached itself to the rock. That way it won't flit to its sides and also protect the clam from predators sneaking up underneath it.
 
Bury the rock 1/2" under the sand, place the clam over the rock. If necessary, stablize the clam with some rubble so it doesn't fall to its side. Just add water and wait!
 
Just wondering because I'm new at clams, why does it have to be put on a rock instead of directly in the sand?

Another thing, I have some blue hermits in the tank, I'm slowly removing them because they're kiling my snails and my clam had a whole bunch of short little "hair" like things on it and the crabs have been only on the shell of it, (not the flesh) and the clam doesn't seem to mind, but the crabs are eating these hair things like crazy, making the clam nice and clean looking :)
 
There shouldn't be any trouble with hermits, I have 5 clams and 30 or 40 hermits and they never hurt them.
As of placing clam on a rock. Part of it is because Crocea likes bright light, so eventually you'd want to place it high up in the upper level. Part of it is because crocea has a habit of boring into rocks, thus the nickname "boring clam". It will feel more safe and secure at home when it is attached to a piece of rock and boring into it. The clam secrets an acid to dissolve the rock and use its rapid shell movement to bore into the rock. My reason for putting the calm onto the rock is for easy placement. If your clam is placed onto a shallow sandy bottom, removing it from the spot for future changes will be pain in the @#%. And you can easily cause a fatal wound if you don't do it properly. If you have it on a thick sand bed, Crocea's "clapping" habit will make you a busy person flipping it back to it's upright position nightly. Finally, if you put it onto a rock, not only it is less likely for it to flip over once it has attached itself to the rock, you can easily move the clam around the tank for future rearrangement by moving the rock since rocks won't root to the bottom of your tank like clams do. So the option is yours I am simply listing the cons and pros.
 
One last thing to mention is predator prevention. Since crocea has the largest bissal gland opening at the bottom of the shell (largest of all giant clams by proportion) it is very easy for any preditor to pick on it from the bottom where it cannot close up. By placing it onto a rock will prevent most preditors from entering the clam "back door".
 
Ok thank you very much, I understand now. Yes, it is on its side again, I moved it up some and it still in that spot and fully open, but I'd rather it be fully upright. I will look for a nice piece of flat rock the next couple days at the LFS. Would you just recommend liverock? Or just like a small block of concrete or aragonite or whatever it is they use for frag plugs. I did notice the large bissal gland opening on the clam as well, they're very neat creatures! It's crazy I look at the inside of it from one angle and this one part looks green and then as I move my head down it turns neon blue, its crazy!
 
One of the most exciting thing about clams mantles is they do change colors as you move your viewing angle. It is a true 3D art form. What I have done in the past is find a piece of concrete from ruins or junk and shatter it into little flat pieces. You can use liverock, concrete or ceramic, as long as you cure them before you put them in there. For your purpose maybe a small piece of flat liverock will be the best fit.
 
My 3" crocea was firmly attached to the rock in two weeks. But again every clam is different depends on its maturity, condition, and size. you can give it a light nudge to check its stability once a week until you are confident it is nice and firm.
 
OK took your advise steven ilu, I actulley forgot I had two rocks that I got from LiveAquaria that were the bases of a clam/oyster. I have had some algae recently, so I briefly dipped the rock in freshwater to kill all algae on it, and put my clam (it wasn't attached to the shallow sand bed yet) in the inside of the previous clam/oyster shell rock that I got from LiveAquaria, looks much nicer in this position, I'll take a picture later because I pulled some algae out too, so the water is a little cloudy.
 
It's dark neon purple with blue neon stripes, and from the top it's aqua/green. The little grey thing next to it is just a powerhead attachment that I was cleaning and didn't attach well so it flew off lol. You can see all the algae in there, but none of it has grown on my corals. Most of it is this weird vine macroalgae I believe. And you can see the tip of my favia to the left :)

Also, I can see it already starting to attach its foot, which is good :)


DSC04939.jpg
 
agree, looks like you could use some cleaning crew. The clam actually will help a little since it will filter out nitrate from your water as its nutrient.
 
lol I know I know!!! Would you guys recommend a refugium to help? Or just a sump to increase the total water volume. I only have an AquaC Remora skimmer on there now which pulls out about 3/4 of the cup a day. But I only have one clownfish in there, I don't know where I'm getting the high nutrients. I just started using the RO/DI last week though, should help compared to RO only.

My cleaning crew doesn't work very good.. I have 10 astrea, 2 pepp shrip, 3 emerald crabs (which when I took that rock out today to freshwater dip, as I was pulling it out of the tank and checking for anything on it, snails etc.. jumped off and put his claws up ready to fight lol it was funny), 20 nass, 12 blue legged. I was thinking of adding some more snails, cerith and a few mexico turbo, and maybe a queen conch and I think an urchin would pick up all this fast but I don't want one moving my corals and rocks around!


Sorry for asking a whole bunch of un-clam-related questions, but.. it relates to the.. clam.. tank.. haha
 
Throwing more cleanup crew only adds to the Bio-load and doesn't fix the underlying problem. First, address where the excess nutrients are coming from. Not using RODI will certainly be a problem and could take a long time to recover fully from.

What's your nitrate level? Have you even run a phosphate remover like Phosban? Even if you've tested for 0 nitrates it is wise to run a phosphate remover in a case like this.
 
Nitrates are 0, I have a phosphate remover, how would you recommend I run it? I don't have a phos reactor, I only have this phosphate remover called.. "Phosphate and Silicate Magnet" by Marc Weiss products that I won at a frag swap. I could put it in the pre-skimmer box of my AquaC Remora.
 
Well, he keeps falling off of that empty clam shell thing (3 times now) so we kept putting him in there in a more secure position. So I guess I'll put some rock rubble around it so he can't fall out until he attaches his foot?
 
I thought that once a clam was this size you didn't need to feed it phytoplankton anymore? Can't they "feed themselves" by using the light once they are around 2 1/2" long??
 
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