Sea Cucumber advise please

[Gtstricky]

I ordered a clean up crew and the store needed to sub some things which I said was fine. Instead of a tiger tail cucumber I received a 2 sea cucumbers that are about 5 inches long and black. They are about the size of a nice susage link.

They were put in last Thursday and the one has been hanging out near my return line the entire time. I thouht it might be stuck and moved it to some rock and it went right back. The other has been the the water line near my cleaning magnet. They both have stayed very high in the tank.

Does this sound normal?

 

[boomsticks]

Yeah they are filter feeders, well the versions you got. They really won't do much cleaning though. And your talking with a guy who has had two BAD experiences with cuc's and I hate them. You can find better scavengers that don't have the possibility of wiping out the entire tank.

Just my two cents,

Mike

 

[plateboy3293]

I personally have an atlantic cuc he stay near the top of the tank with the powerheads and skimmer. He cleared up some micro specs I was seeing in the tank. I think he's great so I ordered another one. The down side they could kill your tank.

 

[650-IS350]

I had 1 4" tiger tail cuc.. now I have 2 5" + cleaners.. love these guys. A lot of hearsay about nukeing a tank and all, but from what I've read... seaapples are the most to worry about or the filtering type cuc's. Mopping types are more reefsafe, most secretions are more of an irritant (self defense )

 

[DNickell]

I had a black cucumber at one time. It would occassionally get up on the glass and I'd put it back down on the sand, where it would stay for weeks at a time, doing a remarkable job of cleaning. The LFS owner where I bought it called them "Sea Turds," which is actually pretty descriptive.

After a year or so in my tank it died without warning at all. It didn't take anything else with it, but overnight it turned into a mass of fibrous stringy things that stuck to the net when I dipped it out. The stringy things could not be cleaned off the net, and I ended up throwing it away.

Had I not found the dead cucumber within a very short time (it was feeding when i went to bed and dead when I got up) it might well have caused damage in the tank.

It did a good job of cleaning my sand and did not, in my case, kill anything when it died, but the mess it made when it died was enough that I won't be getting another.