"Ya, the red starfish is a Fromia, but I do have a blue and an orange linckia as well. Oh, and also a sand sifting starfish. I will admit that I do hunt down and banish gorilla (those fuzzy ones) crabs. I used to let them be but did eventually notice them having a midnight snack on my SPS. Now those are bad inverts in my book So far have only had to pull out 3 though."

Orange one is a fromia too:mrgreen:

except for the fact that the claws on the emerald crab are specilized for removing algae not for catching prey, they are flat ended to give them grip so they can pull chunks of algae off rocks, and they are not hairy.

Steve

http://images.google.ca/imgres?imgur...a%3DN%26um%3D1

Looks pretty dang hairy to me.....perhaps yours has a "Mach 5" or something.....those claws are indeed designed for algae....but that doesnt mean they dont also work for pulling out sps polyps or pulling off zoanthids.....most small emeralds will concentrate on algae, but as they get bigger they start to change their diet to scavenging for whatever they can find.

Really?? It looks exactly like my blue Linckia except for being orange. Looks nothing like my red Fromia.. weird.. and confused now
!

The red(with tiny black pores?) one is likely milliporella and the name of the other one escapes me now....It is in the invert edition of the Baensch(sp?) atlas at the shop.....No such thing as an orange linckia....as far as my research has shown.:wink:....no need to be confused......they are commonly mislabeled.

I thought you were talking about the same hairyness as the ugly guys that have a harry shell also, ya they have hair ont he legs. I had 3 in my tank for about 5 years, never seen them attack coral at all, so I don't know, hit and miss maybe? like anything else.

Steve

Cool, thanks! Learn something new every day. I've always assumed he was an orange linckia. He still looks and behaves exactly like the blue one though :lol:

I do remember now that I once had a cowrie snail because I thought they were cool. He ended up eating things that I did not want him to eat :( I still think they look cool every time I see them at the LFS but don't want to risk a repeat of that incident.

When I finished cycling my tank I added a cleanup crew with a bunch of snails and three hermits. A green reef and two red hermits. The green one got much larger than the red and quickly made meals of two hermits and most of the snails in the tank. Despite the fact it was the biggest one in the tank and I had a bevy of shells available for him to move into when he grew out of his current shell.

As much as I like hermits, I'll be hard pressed to add them to any other tank that I do.

well i have been sampling a variety of hermits lately and now know of about 3 types i wont reuse due to size or aggression. the green ones for algae they get huge and in my bowfront i have a few wierd ones that are starting to get huge..

My emerald started yanking sps polyps so I got rid of him. My hermits (5) have not killed my 2 snails. My powerhead got one snail awhile back and the other snail has been fine.

They are clumsy but seem harmless. I like watching inverts a lot and while the hermits sorta plow over things sometimes If I *do* want to remove them it's so easy as they're slow!