Perfect clean up crew?

[javondi]

I would like to get somewhat of the best clean-up crew I could possibly get. Some of the things I would prefer the clean up crew to take care of is the sand bed, algae (detritus is the main algae I deal with), and the live rock of course. Any suggestions of snails, crabs, shrimp I should get and how many?

I have a 120 gallon tank thats been setup for about a year and a half, with a few frags of zoas, mushrooms, clown fish and a diamond gobie.

 

[chirojosh]

Everybody will have differing opinions. I have 2 cleaner shrimp, a fire shrimp, banded serpent star, tuxedo urchin, emerald crab, and 6 scarlet hermits. Before getting the hermits I had about 12-15 snails, but my cleaner shrimp were making short order of them, so I replaced them with some hermits that can actually defend themselves if need be. But I do know I will be replacing them over time as they slowly take each other out (hermits). This is in a 45g cube.

 

[Nautifishy]

I personally like using snails and they work great in my tank, nassarius to clean the sand and turbos and margaritas for all other things. Those guys never stop eating and never had issue with them eating coral or any thing you would not want them to eat. If you have an aiptasia problem then cleaner shrimps are the solution. As for quantity, you can check out some of the websites that sale livestock they usually have a chart of some sort. To fight some of the nuisance algae I added some red macro algae to my tank. Not only does it look good in the aquascape but it consumes some of the nutrients that the bad algae need to grow. After adding the macro I never really had a crazy outbreak. Hope this can help a little.

 

[Bielaz]

if you live in california, id go for a dive, get some wavy top snails, id say five or six for the size of your tank, and buy around ten-fifteen hermit crabs. if you cant get these snails, id just go for a brittle star and some nass snails. they are aggresive feeders. they'll eat all the detritus on the sand bed. plus all of these are reef safe from my observations.

 

[edinphilly]

Go slow building up your CUC. It's so easy to put too many in and then they end up starving and dying off leading to more issues. A cycle that LFS will usually support because every time you have an algae problem you're back for more CUC. Learned this the hard way.

 

[andrew1028]

how to handle a sea urchin?

how to handle a sea urchin?

Hi im new to the saltwater hobby and i just ordered my very first clean up crew for my 125 and i got 2 short spined sea urchins. im drip acclimating them right now. i was wondering, how long do i acclimate them, along with starfish and how do i grab them to put them in my tank?

 

[Calappidae]

Hi im new to the saltwater hobby and i just ordered my very first clean up crew for my 125 and i got 2 short spined sea urchins. im drip acclimating them right now. i was wondering, how long do i acclimate them, along with starfish and how do i grab them to put them in my tank?

Welcome!

As long as it's not a long spine (Astropyga radiata, Echinothrix calamari, Diadema setosum, etc) you should be perfectly fine with picking them up, they're not as prickly as they look. (Tuxedo feels like velcro!)

The long spines are venomous and sting so just make sure it's not one of those. If you can provide a picture that would help, but sounds like Pseudoboletia or Lytechinus variegatus to me.

Acclimate them slowly, float them in the bag for 30 minutes minimum, and slowly adjust them to the water, the supplier should provide instructions for drip acclimation, I wouldn't recommend drip acclimation for any livestock other than stars, urchins, etc.

Also for future reference, make a new thread when asking for information. It helps keep everyone on topic.

 

[Jaffy]

Fish can technically be part of the cleanup crew