rock boring urchin

[Laurier]

so i bought some live rock a month ago and well since than a rock boring urchin has come out. now i have added some lps and shrooms in the bc14 and i was just about to add my acans in a few weeks. should i get rid of this guy and bring it back to the lfs?

 

[mndfreeze]

It seems from what I can find on it that its reeef safe and other then knocking crap over or hiding all the time in a hole it burrows into the rock there shouldn't be a problem. Worst case scenario is there just isn't enough food for it to graze but you can make food for it. I personally don't have an urchin yet as I'm still waiting to trade my cleaner shrimp for a tuxedo collector, hehe, but google gave me this for food..not sure if this is generic for all urchins or just specific species. You will want to ersearch more.

http://saltaquarium.about.com/gi/o....p://www.stanford.edu/group/Urchin/cookie.html

 

[Laurier]

Thanks for getting back to me. Ya everything i have been seeing on the internet has been saying they eat coraline algae and gha. So far he hasn't been an issue for me, i will let him be for a bit but a friend of mine said he would take him off my hands.

I am mostly looking for personal experiences people have had with these guys. cool little bugger as a hitchiker. sadly i also found a Asterina starfish which i wasn't to pleased about and hoping it was the only one that made it on the rock

 

[TheSurgeon]

I have one that someone else got as a hitchhiker. One of my favorite reef critters. It's fun to play 'find mr. spikey' and its neat to see it cruising around at night leaving trails of destruction in my algae population.

I had 2 pencil urchins and the rock boring. I got rid of the pencils and kept the rock boring if that tells you anything. He's pretty docile about moving stuff around. They are a lot less disruptive then the other urchins IMO.