Inverts that will never be put in my tank again
 

Well just thinking i would start a thread where people could post inverts they have purchased either thinking or being told that they are reef safe. only to have said invert destroy they tank in its own fashion.




1) Bumble bee snail - Will eventually eat every snail in your tank with no discrimination due to size.

2 ) Arrow crab - may be responsable for the death of many shrimp and fish. after it grew to a decent size. not once did i see it eat a bristle worm. and never lost a tank mate til after he was added. when he died it was a group effort from nearly all who survived. quite the pay per view event and i only caught the tail end.

Well, it wasn't on purpose, but letting that "cute harmless looking little hitchhiker crab" that came on my rics live cost me 90% of a $140 ric rock!!

On the plus side, I think he is finally dead lol.

Camel Shrimp......were sold to me as peppermint's..........they munched holes right threw my toad stool. And my zoo's have never been the same since.

urchins, look cool but rase total terror on my tank, tipping every thing over

emerald crabs!

i have found that all shrimp, crabs, stars, urchins and snails are annoying in a reef. They steal food, knock things over, steal frags and frustrate me. I will never put critters like this in my tanks again.

Anybody have any "sexy dancing shrimp" plagues? (I haven't just wondering)

bumble bee snail is a must not - eats clams and soft corals

Tiger Cowre is also a no no, it eats hair algae when it's small but will start to eat corals when it gets larger, I know it ate my GSP for sure.

Emerald crab

totally agree. I hate them now, all they do is mess everything up and pull frags off of the rockwork that you just mounted. imo the jackass's of the hobby

I had a Cowrie eat my GSP as well.
Did not know about the bumble bee I better take out the one I got.:surprise:
Anyone want it?:twised:

I have three of these and don't mind them just make sure everything is glued down. They are great algae eaters.

My urchin eats soft corals: toadstools, Xenia, anthelia and his favorite is zoas. Must feed him nori every couple days or he will eat everything...

any hermit crab. they have a preference for snails and when they run out of snails they just kill each other and have no interest in eating any algae whatsoever.

+1 Hate the little buggers!

I have no idea what the hermits eat in my tanks but they don't eat enough snails in my opinion :lol:

The only good crab is a porcelain crab in my opinion and even they can cause problems so no more crabs period.

Green death brittle star, it never had a chance to eat any fish but it was a bad impulse purchase that now lives in my sump.

Any kind of anemone (including tube anemones). I've only had a couple problems but they arent a good long term member of a mixed reef.

Turbo snails because they become too large and clumsy.

Rock boring urchin because mine kept eating the silicone holding the tank together. It too now lives in my Rubbermaid sump.

So what I've read out of this thread is that these critters seem to all behave differently in everyone's tanks (no surprise I guess) :-) Just like that "hit-and-miss" fish (aka, flame angel, etc..). You can never know for sure how they will behave in your tank. Save for a mantis shrimp incident a long time ago, I haven't had any problems with any inverts that I have purposefully put in my tank. In fact, I love inverts and how they interact with one another. My list includes starfish (red reef, lenckia), an urchin, an army of hermits, 4 skunk cleaners, 2 fire shrimp, 2 peppermint shrimp, 3 sexy shrimp, acro crabs, a Porcelain crab, snails of various sorts. Heck, I even enjoy just sitting there watching abalone craw across rock work. I know I'm weird like that. Those little buggers are amazingly fast though... sometimes I think they race.

My anenome crab seems harmless enough, just stays in the anemone all the time.:biggrin:

I had two halloween hermits that got very big and aggressive. They both killed my counches and stole their shells. One went back to the LFS the other met his match with a blue legged hermit with a killer right hook.

+1 :biggrin:

I got a cool orange/red legged, large (fist sized) hermit crab that ate my all my lil crabs and then catch him eating my starfish live! Bastard! :sad:

Love my emerald, hes about 2 inches across and perhaps the biggest reason there's no pest algae on any of my zoa colonies. Also love my urchin, don't even have to frag my zoas any more I just take them off the little pin cushion. If we expanded this to any animal you shouldn't put in a reef then I would have to say a red corris wrasse, the one I had was satan spawn.

Ok, you need to have an explanation, as I will never have a tank with out a couple emeralds :mrgreen:

Steve

can our emerald crabs meet so that yours can tell mine the how to actually take car of a tank

We have 3 bumble bees in our 75 with 2 clams and many corals. No issue at all

i have an emerald that is 2 inches across as well and he has never caused me any problems what so ever. but im with ll the people who are against hermits i hated mine cause they just kept eating all my snails. so now they're slowly disappearing as they become mantis food haha. i would also never buy an urchin again as i am against gluing all my corals and rocks together and they seem to never like my style of aquascaping and think it should all be bulldozed to the ground

I agree that it seems as though inverts are hit and miss. I have had a halloween hermit for over a year and I love him. He never bothers anything and is always eating algae, the other hermits occasionally eat snails, but he's an angel!

Im like you Kien.....I have a plethora of inverts in the tank....no shrimp anymore as my mystery wrasse finds them tasty....two tuxedo urchins, two fromia stars(Kien if your star is red, it is actually a fromia star, not a linkia....commonly mislabeled) pom pom crab(seen it once in a year), a bunch of different hermies,and an assortment of snails.....I just think crabs are to cool not to have in my reef, so I accept them for what they are.

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 :twised: So far have only had to pull out 3 though.

you know.. I have been reading how many people are against hermits, but I have made a few observations over the last 8 years about them and snails. now this is just what I have seen or concluded and not nessasarly fact, but ....

what I have decided is they don't kill snails but rather take out the ones that are dieing anyways. I have come to this conclusion as I used to have a ton of hermits of a few different types, I like watching them and the little blue legged ones do an amazing job of eating algae off the rocks if you have enough, but I noticed snaills were dieing off. thinking it was the hermits eating them I went on a campaine to remove the hermits. I went from about 50 or 60 to about 3 and added a bunch more snaills. the snaills then dies off at the same rate even though the hermit numbers were only a fraction of the previous numbers. so after removing the last of the hermits I added a bunch more snails.. same result.

for the next 5 years I looked at the life span of different types od snails and decided the only ones I will now buy are asteria, and mexican red turbos (if I need them) I found regular turbos are buldozers, margerita snaills just die for no reason and quickly. frome reading I have found they are actualy a colder water snail and this may be why. but I have found all snails seam to have a higher death rate than other things we put in our tank, but because they are cheep we just buy more.

so over the years I have decided that the hermits arn't killing the snails only culling out the already dieing ones, which is a bonus as the dying snail is eaten quickly and can't polute the tank.

so in my opinion hermit crabs are ok.

Steve

Explain what? Emerald crabs are in the mithrax family.....the vast majority of the hairy legged hitchhiker crabs we find and try to remove are also from the mithrax family.....a crab is a crab is a crab....they are opportunistic and will kill, given the opportunity.

"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!