Emerald Crab returns!

Our tank has been steadily growing algae ever since we removed all of our crabs. The two scarlet hermits that we added seem to be...well, slow and lazy. They don't seem to do a whole lot for the algae problem. We have been talking over the last week or so and decided that we probably had judged the crabs too harshly before. The firefish after all, didn't actually get killed off like we thought. And the hair algae was much better when we had the crabs before.

We decided to try to find a small emerald crab to add back into the tank. I had seen some small crabs at Horizon Aquatics a little while back, so we decided to start there. We did find a small crab there and when we brought it home I tried to determine its sex. I found a nice illustrated guide on the web to do this. We now have a little female emerald crab! After about 1.5 hours of acclimation, we added her to the tank. She immediately went to work eating. She has been out in the open so we can see her which is just what we wanted! We didn't care for the reclusiveness of the strawberry or the hitchhiker emerald. We are glad to have an emerald back in the tank!