Categories: Pets

Electric Blue Hermit Crab: Cleaning Your Live Rock

If you are wanting some type of hermit crab that will clean all the live rock and sand in your saltwater tank than the Electric Blue Hermit Crab is a very good choice for you. The crab doesn’t get bigger than one inch and it’s extremely easy to take care of. This crab is also blue in color with black stripes running down it’s legs. This crab is also very peaceful and you wont have a problem with it killing your snails, coral or fish. This small hermit crab is an excellent cleaner and it is very beneficial for your tank. Not only does it clean up all of your algae but it will eat your green hair algae too. This is a great choice for somebody battling a green hair algae attack, such as I am.

The best thing to do is purchase about one hermit crab per gallon. If you want more hermit crabs than you can do so. Hermit crabs are about one dollar. They are actually cheaper than your average snail that you can buy. Snails will clean your glass and sand but hermit crabs will clean your sand and live rock. You will usually want a combination of both both to get the job done. Electric Blue Hermit Crabs also have orange and blue tentacles which is usually how you tell them apart from the other two types of blue hermit crabs. These hermit crabs are easy to care for as long as you keep the temperature and salinity within the right level. You will also want to purchase some saltwater hermit crab food. If you cannot find any you can purchase it online for your hermit crabs.

You will want to keep the temperature at about 71 to 76 degrees. You will also want to keep the salinity at around 1.022 to 1.025. Hermit crabs require a more strict salinity level that your saltwater fish will. If you decide that you are going to purchase hermit crabs, don’t forget to check your salinity and make sure that is falls within the correct range or the hermit crabs will get stressed out and you will see little bodies laying all over the sand at the bottom of your fish tank.

Hermit crabs are known for eating seaweed when there is not enough algae to eat. If you have a lot of hermit crabs you will probably want to purchase two different veggie clips and place on on each end of the saltwater tank. You will also want to place some hermit crab food in the tank as well. Then you will have absolutely no problems keeping these cool little creatures alive. You will be able to watch them clean up your fish tank in no time. You will still need to do a 20% water change at least once every two weeks.