Cleaning Crews...

fgcu14

fgcu14

Member
This is my first salt water tank and I am not trying to fall into the trap of having a perfictly clean tank. However I would like something to eat algea. Any suggestions for a 46 gal FO tank?
Also After reading several posts I have found that many of you have ALOT of snails, crabs, and shrimp. Is that really nessesary to have 20-30 algea eating critters?
 
mark_d

mark_d

Member
i doubt it... i have 2 mexican turbo snails and 5 hermits to eat the algae and 2 nassarius snails to deal with the sand. I need another sand sifter since the nassarius dont do as much as i thought theyd do... but the 5 hermit 2 snail combo wiped all the algae off my tank in like 2 days... and since theres so few of em, hermits arent fightin and snails dont overrun my tank...
OH! i also have an emerald crab, just one...
he also seems to help quite a bit... maybe since ur tank is roughly 2X mine, just get 2X what i did.... 4 turbos, 10 hermits, and 2 emeralds to take care of algae isnt too much. . .
 
mark_d

mark_d

Member
well to be honest... no... while mexican turbo's are kinda big and not so pretty, they stay put during the day. In my case they go next to the heater on the back of my aquapod and just sleep there. The nassarius will spend most of the day in the sand too, so you wont see em.
These guys will go around @ night, but they arent an eyesore really, and this is comin from a guy who had absolutely no intention to add snails, and i tried to not get any, but in the end, snails so their jobs, and crabs/shrimp do not eat algae off the glass. Also, even if u scrape it off it grows back... so snails are the best method IMO.
You could just do what I did tho... I was told to get a lot more than I did.. so just get say get 2, give em a couple of days and seehow good of a job theyre doin. it took my 2 snails a day or so to eat all the algae on my glass. After that only a little patches would appear in the day and get eaten that night... now i barely have any algae... its very minimal and I dont intend to get another snails for what i got.
 
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