reeferstudent
New Member
Hi Everyone, first post. I have had a reef tank now for almost one year, my only fish are a clown pair, and a clown goby who is my favorite. I also have a few stars, and nas and troch snails. I recently went on vacation, and returned to find my corals dead and choked out by long hair algae and aiptasia. I looked online and ordered 5 blue leg hermit crabs to take care of the algae. My salinity is 35% or 1.026, and my KH is a little low sitting at 7.8. But my new peppermint shrimp I bought last week seem to be thriving, have molted succesfully.
Onto the matter at hand, I acclimated my new hermit crabs over a one hour period, temperature and drip acclimate. I add them to the tank and they immediately started chowing down on the hair algae. I came home from work last night and my peppermint shrimps were feasting on one in their den. Weird i thought, but i looked online and the consensus was that they are not capable of killing hermit crabs, so i thought it must have died and they did what scavengers do. This morning i woke up to find them with another one, and the snails had joined the party, i checked them all and all the shells were empty except one, which when i turned over, out plopped what i assumed to be a dead crab, no color and had no claws. As i went to, very sombrely and respectfully, put him in the toilet grave, i noticed him curl up and twitch a little. I ran back to the aquarium and put him under a shell in a safe nook. Now I don't know if they really died, or if they were molting and the shrimp grabbed them and ate them in a weakened state. I don't know what else i could have done to acclimate them better? I am stumped and depressed to be responsible for these deaths.
Does anyone have any theories or similar experiences? I need to learn what went wrong, are the shrimp to blame? I won't order anymore until i get to the bottom of this, also i live in china and they are very expensive here to be just shrimp snacks. Thanks for reading my essay.
Onto the matter at hand, I acclimated my new hermit crabs over a one hour period, temperature and drip acclimate. I add them to the tank and they immediately started chowing down on the hair algae. I came home from work last night and my peppermint shrimps were feasting on one in their den. Weird i thought, but i looked online and the consensus was that they are not capable of killing hermit crabs, so i thought it must have died and they did what scavengers do. This morning i woke up to find them with another one, and the snails had joined the party, i checked them all and all the shells were empty except one, which when i turned over, out plopped what i assumed to be a dead crab, no color and had no claws. As i went to, very sombrely and respectfully, put him in the toilet grave, i noticed him curl up and twitch a little. I ran back to the aquarium and put him under a shell in a safe nook. Now I don't know if they really died, or if they were molting and the shrimp grabbed them and ate them in a weakened state. I don't know what else i could have done to acclimate them better? I am stumped and depressed to be responsible for these deaths.
Does anyone have any theories or similar experiences? I need to learn what went wrong, are the shrimp to blame? I won't order anymore until i get to the bottom of this, also i live in china and they are very expensive here to be just shrimp snacks. Thanks for reading my essay.
