How many inverts should you have?

[NemoNano]

Hi Guy's

I just have a quick question for you.

How many inverts should you have in a tank to keep it clean? I have been told 1 per G. that seems like a lot.

Also if anyone could think of some good cheep one's I have a monkey shrimp and 3 zebra hermit crabs for my 33 G. (FOWLR) tank with two fish in it (I was going to add 2 more fish after the christmas holidays). I was thinking of adding a few peppermint shrimp.

Thanks,

 

[skipm]

There really is no correct answer to your question. You need however many it takes to keep your tank clean. In a 33 gallon tank I would start out with around 20 or so different cleaners and see how well they keep things cleaned and go from there. I personally like a wide variety of snails with a few hermits.

 

[incysor]

skipm is right. Because different inverts will eat different things, and different tanks have different clean up needs it's often more complicated than you'd think.

I usually try for a mix that includes blue leg hermits, scarlet hermits, astrea, margarita, trochus, and cerith snails. Once your tank has matured a bit you might want to add a nassarius snail or two to help keep the sandbed stirred.

B

 

[skipm]

I want to point out that there are some inverts that are not suitable for nano tanks. Some examples of these are abalones, fighting or queen conches, turbo snails (they tend to bulldoze things around the tank), bumble bee snails (these are actually not cleaners, they are carnivores), urchins are also not good cleaners because they move things around and they also eat coralline algae. Brittle and serpent stars are not good in smaller nanos because they may not get enough food and go after fish. Incysor gave a good starter list, take some of each and go from there. HTH, Skip

 

[NemoNano]

Thanks for all your feedback;

I am going to pick up a few shrimp this week this week (to take care of a Aiptasia anemone on a one of my live rocks) and a few snails next week.

Thanks,

Eric