Seahorse Club
Aquarium & Livestock

Feed Ezy Frozen Mysis

Seahorse Club
Aquarium & Livestock

Feed Ezy Frozen Mysis

Seahorse Club
Aquarium & Livestock

Feed Ezy Frozen Mysis

Seahorse Club
Aquarium & Livestock

Feed Ezy Frozen Mysis

Seahorse Club
Aquarium & Livestock

Feed Ezy Frozen Mysis

Seahorse Club
Aquarium & Livestock

Feed Ezy Frozen Mysis

Pinky Cukes & Micro Hermits

  • This topic has 1 reply, 2 voices, and was last updated 12 years ago by Pete Giwojna.
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  • #1947
    Donsods2
    Member

    IPSF offers what appears to be a well balanced clean-up crew package they call "Reef Tune-Up". I have read in posts on reef websites that hobbists rave about IPSF’s captive bred strains of strombus, turbos & trochus. Has anyone had any experience with them? Of greatest interest are their inclusion of a "Pinky Cuke" ([i][/i]holothuris sp[i][/i]) and "MicroHermits" ([i][/i]calcinus sp[i][/i]). Any thoughts or experiences?

    #5417
    Pete Giwojna
    Guest

    Dear Don:

    Yes, sir – I have done business with Indo-Pacific Sea Farms (IPSF) on many occasions and they are a reputable company that offers some worthwhile products, in my experience.

    However, I have not tried their Reef Tank Tuneup Package, so I cannot say whether or not that’s a great deal or not based on my personal experience. I did go to the IPSF website and look up the contents of the Reef Tank Tuneup Package, Don, and it certainly looks like a good deal at first glance. Most of the specimens it includes are excellent scavengers and would make very good aquarium janitors for a seahorse tank as well as a reef system. It’s an excellent price for an assortment that includes 50 assorted sanitation engineers.

    The only specimen In the Reef Tank Tuneup assortment I have any reservations about is the Pinky Cuke, Don. Having no personal experience with this particular type of sea cucumber, I cannot say if it’s a good aquarium janitor or should be regarded with caution. I don’t believe you need to have any concerns about toxicity with this small sea cucumber, but there are a number of other things to consider when adding sea cucumbers to your cleanup crew, as discussed in more detail below:

    Holothurians or sea cucumbers are echinoderms, close relatives of the starfish and sea urchins. They have the same pentameral, or 5-sided, radial symmetry as sea stars and sea urchins, which is most evident as the five rows of tubefeet that run longitudinally down their long, wormlike bodies. They are simple sessile animals that have no brain, heart, or eyes, breath through their anus and often entertain houseguests therein (e.g., pearlfish , commensal crabs, and parasitic snails, all of which are allowed to nibble freely on their innards) and routinely disembowel themselves in response to stress. Their mouth is located at the opposite end of their bodies from the busy (and oft crowded) anus and is surrounded by branching, sticky, mucus-coated tentacles, which can lengthen or shorten dramatically, and are used to sweep or mop up the substrate, gather up all manner of dead or decaying organic matter, and pass it into their mouths. Basically, they consume organic detritus and ingest fine-grained sands and sediments to digest off the bacteria, microalgae and diatoms that cover the surface of each sand particle.

    The beneficial Aspidochirotiacea sea cucumbers that make useful aquarium janitors feed by burrowing into and ingesting the sediment, digesting what is edible from it, then excreting the rest. Cucumbers with this type of feeding technique make good sand stirrers and substrate cleaners. As they burrow through it, they continually swallow the silt and sand, extracting animal and plant remains as the sediment passes through their intestines. Dirty sediment goes in, clean sediment comes out. Their excrement is therefore clean and relatively nonpolluting. Feeding is a full-time occupation and nonstop operation for these burrowers, and they can process an incredible amount of sand through their intestinal assembly line. It is estimated that a single sea cucumber digests, filters, cleans, and expels up to 45 kilograms of seabed a year in this manner! Suffice it to say, there is no need to vacuum your sand bed if it houses burrowing sea cucumbers.

    However, sea cucumbers in this feeding category can often be picky eaters, because some feed only on fine sand, while others prefer relatively course sand. Therefore, if the proper type of sediment a particular sea cucumber needs is not provided, it may not feed. If you have a gravel bottom in your tank or a bare glass bottom, rather than a substrate of fine "sugar" sand, do not consider sea cucumbers.

    Sea cucumbers can be problematic aquarium specimens under certain circumstances because of their many unusual defense mechanism, which may sometimes have an adverse impact on their tankmates, as described below:

    (1) Evisceration or autovisceration: they may forcibly eject all of their internal organs through their anus, presumably to distract predators while the cuke makes a slow-motion getaway. This act of voluntary disembowelment surprisingly does the sea cucumber no permanent harm, as the internal organs are regenerated over a period of months, but it gives a new meaning to the phrase "puking your guts out." Spilling their guts in this fashion is a response to a life-threatening situation — predation, chemical stress, low oxygen levels that cannot support them — and can help the sea cucumber survive until conditions are more favorable. No chemical discharge normally occurs when they eviscerate, so this odd behavior is not a threat to the aquariums inhabitants.

    (2) Regurgitating Cuvierian tubules — glue traps. At the slightest provocation, some cukes expel masses of very strong, long, extremely sticky, filamentous threads (Cuvierian tubules) to deter predators. Other animals, especially spiny crabs, become hopelessly trapped in these adhesive tubules and the more they struggle, the worse they become entangled until they are as incapacitated as if they were wrapped up tightly in a straight jacket. Once trapped in this sticky web, they are doomed to a slow death. The hobbyist can intervene to save the entrapped animal(s), of course, but disentangling them by hand is a painstaking process that can be the devil’s own business.

    (3) Animated Goop — morphing into tight places. Some cukes can more or less liquefy their bodies (a process that hobbyists often refer to as "goopifying") in order to ooze or pour themselves into the tighest cracks, crevices, and hidey holes for protection. Once they’ve holed up in this manner, they inflate their bodies with water and solidify their skin again, wedging themselves tightly in place to prevent their extraction. A harmless enough trick, you might think — until the tight space they wedge themselves into and plug up is the intake, drain, or overflow of their aquarium! To prevent this sort of accident, aquariums that house Holothurians should be cucumber-proofed, a task most seahorse keepers have already accomplished in order to prevent their ponies from being suck up by filter intakes and overflows.

    (4) Chemical Warfare — the dreaded "cuke nuke!" Some sea cucumbers release toxins (holothurin and holotoxin) while alive when threatened (or even after death, in some cases). These toxins can be quite deadly to fishes but don’t seem to affect most invertebrates. The group of colorful sea cucumbers known as Poison Apples are the worst offenders in that regard, and a large specimen is said to be able to release enough toxin to kill all of the fishes in a small, closed system aquarium and wipe out the entire tank. Such rare Holothurian-related aquarium accidents have become known as "cuke nukes," an unfortunate appellation that has given all sea cucumbers a bad reputation with hobbyists.

    This is regrettable because the beneficial Aspidochirotiacea burrowing and deposit-feeding sea cucumbers are such good sanitation engineers and are much less likely to find themselves in a situation where they must call their defense mechanisms into play, and far less likely to cause ANY trouble than their toxic cousins, the Poison Apples. Still, any aquarist who is considering adding sea cucumbers to his tank should be aware of the potential risks. Anyone who is contemplating cukes should read Rob Toonen’s excellent series of articles about them, which outlines the benefits and risks they may pose in greater detail. It is available online at the following URL:

    http://www.advancedaquarist.com/issues/jan2003/invert.htm

    Sea cucumbers aren’t for everyone, but the right kind can be useful sand shifters and detritivores for seahorse keepers that deep live sand beds (DLSBs) or run modified reef tanks. If you want to give sea cucumbers a try, avoid the colorful filter-feeding Poison Apples, stick with the burrowing sand movers, don’t overstock (one or two cukes is usually plenty), and handle them with care. (The recommended stocking density is no more than 3 inches of sea cucumber per 20 gallons.) If you have any doubts about your ability to handle or care for sea cucumbers properly, then you will probably be better off sticking with snails (especially burrowing Nassarius snails), microhermits, and cleaner shrimp as your sanitation engineers.

    Best wishes with all your fishes, Don!

    Happy Trails!
    Pete Giwojna

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