Who can safely live with two blue leg hermits and deal with hair algae?

[I never finish anythi]

Feeling even calmer about it now I've read that and seen your pics! Very interesting and reassuring!

Many thanks to you and thanks to all here who have helped me today. Even if this doesnt entirely cure the algae, its been a good day!

Get a Mexican turbo snail. Maybe 2.

 

[heathermoor]

Surely in a 10g aquarium it can't be that bad, do you have any pictures, besides adding life, best way to remove algae is manually, even sections/rocks at a time you can remove quite quickly with little effort

Yes I can, as I said, scrub it out which I do at the moment each week with a washing up brush for large areas of it and places on the rock where there are deep holes full of it and a toothbrush for the more finicky areas. I can restore it to some semblance of order in an hour or so but within a day it starts back and after a week its awful. Even that I can cope with but it goes on my coral frags too and especially the clove coral - I cannot get it out of there. I put some plastic gloves on and try to pick/pinch it out but you have to do that under the water or you cant see it as it collapses into the cloves out of the water. Its well nigh impossible to get it out of the middle. I've read about people using peroxide to clean it out of them but, well, if I did that and the coral survived, give it week back in the tank and it would be as bad as ever again. I dont think anything would survive that weekly, would it? Its a major pain in that respect.

 

[Rick's Reviews]

If you want to keep these guys you have keep up maintenance.
Respectfully your initial post was about blue legged hermits.
When hair algae grows to a certain length hermit crabs avoid eating it, along with snails, also they can only each so much daily.

 

[heathermoor]

Yes, thankyou, point taken, I will still have to do weekly jobs, you are right.

But hopefully the urchin will help out a bit too, especially with the corals.

 

[kevgib67]

Thanks for your thoughts. Yes I did start with dry rock. But I only use salt water that I buy ready made up from my lfs, and top up with rodi water that I get there similarly - and they seem like a very good professional and large lfs so I trust them to do it right.

Anyway - reading and researching today I came across another fish store who were selling tuxedo urchins and had some small ones. So I seized the day and drove out and I've got one and brought it home. Its reassuring to read that you have one and it gets on with the job and doesnt cause trouble. I'd estimate it to be about 1.5 cm in diameter so quite tiny. I like that because it gives me time to see its behaviour as it grows before it becomes a big bruiser and I need to find it another home maybe (although I hope not; I dont like parting with pets!) Having said that it looks very small indeed. I'm worried the hermits are going to hurt it now! Just acclimating it now - I thought about 2 hours with drip - and then it can go out. I think I'll just stick with adding that for now and see how it works out. I'd love to have the snails and emerald crabs but I feel like I've stuck my neck out enough for a while with this urchin. Hopefully it is going to do the job and be a fun pet in its own right.

It’s great to have a trusted lfs! Just to be safe I would still test their water before you add it and the RoDi if you don’t make it yourself. Best of luck and enjoy your urchin!

 

[Tired]

Another option, if you decide to give away the urchin when it gets larger (though it might be fine in that tank for life) is money cowries. ReefCleaners sells them sometimes, and their shell shape makes them highly resistant to hermits. They won't eat long hair algae, but you do need algae-eaters in general, and money cowries will eat most kinds.

Keep your nutrients in reasonable levels (which includes not too low), and your tank should pass the ugly stage eventually. In the meantime, you've got the lil urchin, which is always fun to watch.

Oh, and stop scrubbing your rocks. You're scrubbing off the beneficial algae, leaving clean real estate for the invasive algaes to take over.

 

[CoralB]

Tuxedo urchins do work well as long as you trim the long hair algae first and wouldn’t hurt to place them on the algae patch . You can supplement their feeding after the algae is gone or re home . I will say that I noticed that your nitrates are at zero . You definitely want to get that up to at least 10 ppm .

 

[heathermoor]

It’s great to have a trusted lfs! Just to be safe I would still test their water before you add it and the RoDi if you don’t make it yourself. Best of luck and enjoy your urchin!

Since you've said that I've thought about it some more. I do trust them and they are nice people there - but even the best of us, sometimes something is wrong or goes wrong and we all make mistakes. You are right - I shoudl test the water myself anyway - its my responsibility, that.

 

[heathermoor]

Tuxedo urchins do work well as long as you trim the long hair algae first and wouldn’t hurt to place them on the algae patch . You can supplement their feeding after the algae is gone or re home . I will say that I noticed that your nitrates are at zero . You definitely want to get that up to at least 10 ppm .

re the nitrates - since I started this salt tank everything is a learning curve. My last achievement was buying some Salifert tests and learning how to perform those, in addition to the API pH, nitrate, nitrite, ammonia ones that I already was doing for my bettas. So - the next step from learning how to do the further tests is to be learning what to do about any results! I think thats today's research topic!

 

[heathermoor]

Another option, if you decide to give away the urchin when it gets larger (though it might be fine in that tank for life) is money cowries. ReefCleaners sells them sometimes, and their shell shape makes them highly resistant to hermits. They won't eat long hair algae, but you do need algae-eaters in general, and money cowries will eat most kinds.

Keep your nutrients in reasonable levels (which includes not too low), and your tank should pass the ugly stage eventually. In the meantime, you've got the lil urchin, which is always fun to watch.

Oh, and stop scrubbing your rocks. You're scrubbing off the beneficial algae, leaving clean real estate for the invasive algaes to take over.

'Stop scrubbing the rocks....' Thats a brave option!

 

[Tired]

Your rock needs to mature. For that to happen, it has to progress past the stage where fast-growing pest algae is taking over bare or nearly bare rock, and into the stage where slower-growing algaes take up all that space instead. For that, you need nutrients, and you need to not be re-setting the rock back to "ready for early colonizers".

Let the ugly stage happen. If your corals are up off the rocks, and you're careful not to let the hair algae bottom your nutrients out, that algae can't hurt them. Removing long tufts of hair algae by hand is good, so the various algae-eaters can make a dent, but scrubbing the rocks may not be helping anything.

 

[Mark Goode]

My tank is about nine months old, and I have no hair algae problem at all!
Because it won't grow on flatworms.

 

[CoralB]

My tank is about nine months old, and I have no hair algae problem at all - because it won't grow on flatworms.

A coris or melenarus wrasse might help you out with this issue. If you don’t mind a little aggression six lines are helpful

 

[Mark Goode]

A coris or melenarus wrasse might help you out with this issue

They would need an awfully big appetite. I must have syphoned ten thousand of the wretched things out at the weekend. Can you believe I originally thought they were algae? What an idiot.

Anyway, I apologise for my post - I don't mean to hijack this thread.

 

[Stomatopods17]

They would need an awfully big appetite. I must have syphoned ten thousand of the wretched things out at the weekend. Can you believe I originally thought they were algae? What an idiot.

Anyway, I apologise for my post - I don't mean to hijack this thread.

A more specialized and peaceful solution would be velvet nudibranchs.

They exclusively eat the flatworms until the job is done and then starve if they run out. They're completely harmless to anything else in the tank just cover the powerheads/intakes with something so they don't get sucked in and be mindful of tankmates they might eat the nudibranch too. You could probably get a couple in there to really keep the numbers down.

 

[heathermoor]

Your rock needs to mature. For that to happen, it has to progress past the stage where fast-growing pest algae is taking over bare or nearly bare rock, and into the stage where slower-growing algaes take up all that space instead. For that, you need nutrients, and you need to not be re-setting the rock back to "ready for early colonizers".

Let the ugly stage happen. If your corals are up off the rocks, and you're careful not to let the hair algae bottom your nutrients out, that algae can't hurt them. Removing long tufts of hair algae by hand is good, so the various algae-eaters can make a dent, but scrubbing the rocks may not be helping anything.

FRom what bit of scientific education I have that makes sense. But heres the 'but' and rightaway I want to say I am coming at this as a beginner, not someone who claims to know. The 'but' is that when my one fish that I used to have in there was sick and I posted a picture someone noticed all the algae and I was told that all that algae was causing pH swings as it did its respiring thing - putting out CO2 at night - and I should get rid of as much of it as possible as those swings were probably stressing my fish and causing it to be ill. Up till then I had been more or less leaving it there. The fish did get better once I started scrubbing but then after a few weeks relapsed and sadly I lost it.

I dont have a fish in there any more but I do have the hermits and the tiny urchin now and I dont want them stressed. I''m not doubting the sense of what you say but I feel a bit caught between the two things - danged if I do and danged if I dont.

 

[heathermoor]

Perhaps its one of those 'moderation in all things' events. I could leave a bit more. Bu the rocks tend to be where it all is.

 

[littlefoxx]

Hi, I have a 10 US gallon nano tank and have only had it up and running for about just under a year. It doesnt have a refugium or anything like that - everything is in the tank, filter, heater, skimmer.

I wanted the tank to keep blue leg hermits and I have two. I had a diadem dottyback who sadly died after some months and an initial recovery that then failed, of some internal issues despite the best efforts of Reef2reef experts to help me - which knocked me back for a while in confidence (and sadness). But I have rallied and want to progress.

The hermits are my tanks main events - I really like them. But they are little devils. I have tried to start keeping corals but they behave badly with them - I caught one of them with a claw right down inside my duncan coral frag's mouth, rummaging inside it like it was looking for something lost in a full shopping bag! They painstakingly nipped around the places where my 3 coral frags (a duncan, a green clove coral and xenia) are glued onto the frag plug, detached them and then basically roughed them up all around the tank bottom like footballs. They nipped pieces off the xenia - I dont know if they ate any or not. I have to keep the corals up off any surfaces now, where the hermits cannot reach them - they are suspended in the water in an old transparent fish breeder box. An existence which the corals seem to enjoy actually, coming out and waving their thingies about very chirpily and enthusisatically now, as I suppose you would if your previous life involved being beaten up every night. But this doesnt seem long term sustainable to me and is in no way aesthetically quite the thing.

I want my tank to look like one of the tanks I see in pictures on here, with corals placed on the rocks, not the current strange arrangements. But I also face another problem. Hair algae is rife in my tank, all over the rocks in little clumps that are hard to pull out and also getting all over the corals even in the fish breeder box. Every week I have to physically pinch it off the corals and the clove coral frag has died in the middle as a result. It grows back on within a week.

Currently I have been trying to basically scrub it out and hope that eventually it will give up. Each week I take the 3 corals and 2 hermits out of the tank so I cant accidentally injure them and scrub away at the rock, catching the loosened floating algae in a filter and also siphoning it as I go, then put them back. I was hoping to get on top of it that way, but no. Its back within the week. Needless to say, the crabs have little to no interest in it. I see them picking at it, but they make no impression on it at all. This weekly manhandling of the livestock isn't sustainable either - it seems stressful for the creatures and not in any way conducive to having an established aquascape is it?

I have reduced the light, but dont want to kill my corals by having no light and I dont have anywhere else to put them.

I've invested in a tunze 9001 skimmer as I thought that might reduce nutrients for the algae although there didnt seem that much for them - my tests typically showed

pH - 8.0
Ammon - 0
Nitrite - 0
Nitrate - 0
KH/Alk - 9.0
Mag - 1290
Phosphate - 0.03ppm
Calcium - 450

These values are pretty stable from week to week, there or thereabouts. The skimmer chugs away nicely and produces some very pale tea-coloured water but the algae persists.

I feed the corals on an occasional shot - about a couple of ml - of seachem reef phytoplankton about 2/3 times a week directly on them in their box and the duncan and hermits like to eat the hikari marin s pellets I have left that the dotty back used to enjoy - 2/3 times a week.

I've put copepods in as i read that they might help, which are entertaining little things but have had no effect. They seem to survive the scrubbing.

I put some sea lettuce algae in there to outcompete the hair algae for nutrients. It was outcompeted by the hermits who thought it was delicious.

So the next step I am considering is a Tuxedo Urchin. I have read about them a lot and I understand that they are good at attacking and clearing algae? I think my tank is too small for a tuxedo urchin in terms of providing its food, but I have no problem at all in feeding it bought food. Whether in welfare terms it is right is another matter - would it suffer from not having space to roam or is that not an issue as its not a swimmer? They look like entertaining creatures but above all I want a peaceful happy stress-free tank for any inhabitants and thereby for me.

I'm looking at the urchin because its my belief that no snail I purchased - which would otherwise be my go-to to deal with algae - would be safe from the hermits. They would love to have a go at them, is my belief. I really dont want any foreseeable and avoidable deaths of creatures I bring in.

I also believe that the urchin would not harm the hermits - but if anyone knows different please let me know, as their well being is no 1. in these considerations. Despite all they get up to, I'm fond of them. I'm a bit concerned by stories of urchins 'decorating' themselves - I dont want to get up one morning to see a tuxedo urchin 'wearing' an injured hermit.

I'd be grateful for any views on whether an urchin seems a way forward, or any other suggestions. I'm scared of using chemical solutions on the hair algae, I just dont like the idea, it seems like a big intervention that might completely knock my tank out of kilter and I only have the one tank so I have no backup place to put the hermits if that happens.

Reading this list of woe over, it seems like the answer to how to go forward might be 'give up', or resign myself to the weekly scrub out and weird arrangements that are not pretty but seem to keep everyone safe and happy. Which I will if thats best. But I cant help thinking there must be a better way than this. So any help, advice or suggestions are most welcome.

And in any case, if you are still with me, thanks for reading this far.

Get turbo snails, they are way bigger than hermits and eat hair algae. My hermits never touch my corals, they only pick algae off of them and are very good about not hurting them, so thats interesting. I do have more halloween hermits than red or blue legs so maybe thats why?

 

[Tired]

There are people on here who have tanks carpeted in hair algae without it harming the fish. Heck, there are people who have tanks packed with macros for far more mass and don't wind up with any problems for the fish. I'm sure it's possible under some circumstances, but if your tank is aerated reasonably well, that should keep the water plenty oxygenated.

Pulling out long hair algae is good, but it's best done by grabbing tufts and literally pulling (preferably with gloves or tongs in case of stuff entangled in it), not by scrubbing.

 

[heathermoor]

Thanks for your reply - sorry for late response but ive been caught up in things for a day or two.

I darent say what I'll do now because someone will come along and disagree!

Lets just say - I wont be ignoring what you have helpfully advised me with. I plan to go kind of middle of the road and pull out any long stuff. The little urchin seems fine but isnt really making any impression on any algae yet. I dont mind now really, though - I'm glad I got it no matter how it works out. Its a lovely thing in its own right!