Homicidal Hermits

On New Year's Eve, we started to worry about our snails. After the re-aquascaping, we had counted the snails and thought they were all accounted for. Now, however, we could not account for one of the Margarita snails and two of the Nassarius. We began to suspect the hermit crabs which do sometimes attack snails for their shells. We watched the tank intently, and eventually decided that we were definitely missing a Margarita, but that all four Nassarius were present.

On New Year's Day, we could not locate one of our Cerith snails. This was too much casualty, too quickly. We decided it was time to get the hermits out of our reef tank. I ran to Petco and purchased a relatively affordable 5 gallon hex tank. This was going to be the new home for the hermits. I added about 1 inch of reef base to the hex and moved two of our smaller live rock fragments to the new tank. I moved 9 of the hermits that I could reach easily. Our plan is to increase the number of emerald crabs and snails to deal with the algae rather than utilize hermits.

On January 2nd, I discovered that one of the three hermits left in the main tank had been killed over night. Looking at the hex tank, one of the largest hermits had also been killed! The hermits are very opportunistic hunters and apparently even their own kind are not safe. I moved the remaining hermits from the main tank into the hex. We are now down to 10 hermits and 8 snails. We will have to see how many we have tomorrow morning...