Horse Shoe Crabs - how large is too large?

E

Emmittfan

I was looking at purchasing some horse shoe crabs to help keep the sand bed on my 110 gallon tank clean. The online fish site that I was looking at ordering them from only has large - over 2.5-3.5" in stock.

Is this too big? There is plenty of sand in this tank.

In my 80 gallon tank, I have smaller crabs, probably 1.5 to 2" inches max. As such, I am not sure if going with "large" sized crabs will be proper. Thought?

Thanks in advance for the input!!
 
How much open sand do you have? It's not about depth as much as area. (Well, both are important, but if you have a DSB at all, then it comes to depth.)

We got rid of ours when he got to about 4" across the body because he was strong enough to start moving rocks.
 
There is a decent amount of area in the tank that is just side. Probably 3-4 inches in the front with couple inches along the back and about 6 inches along each end.

We probably have 2 inches of sand thoughout.
 
We'd target feed ours when we saw him pop up, and he grew pretty fast. He went from ~2" across to 4" across in under 6 months with good food.
 
What did you feed him? I haven't been doing that in my 80 gallon, although I have been adding plenty of food that makes it to the sand bed.

How hard was it to "get rid" of yours? were you able to take it to an LFS?

Thanks!
 
Krill, shrimp, squid. Whatever I had left over from my FO days, really.

I waited until he was doing the backstroke in the water column to catch him, then I put him in one of those critter carriers that you see eels in at the LFS. I called around and DNA took him for store credit.
 
Bill at Neptune's Cove get's in the tiny one's that he say's only get a couple of inches big. You can give him a ring and ask further detail's but, he's got good price's even before the discount. :wink:

Cheers,
 
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