YVR97

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I have gone to bed seeing one crab and a snail at one end of the tank...in the morning the crab is strutting around in his newly "aquired" home.

For the sake of my snails...is there another member of the cleaner crew you suggest?

In quarenteen until they find a new home!
 

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I prefer hermit crabs to snails, since snails seem to die off when there is no algae to eat, but crabs can be fed dried food, till algae grows back in.
As for hermit crab resistant snails, I keep dwarf cerith snails, they are too small for hermit crabs to use, and they hide under the sand bed during the day. Regular cerith snails in theory should also be OK, but they spend too much time out in the open, and it's just a matter of time till the crab finds it. I have some of those also, though I can't say how many are left, or if they are hiding under the sand also. I have too many empty cerith snails drifting around to know if they were killed off or simply the empty ones when the hermit crabs move on.

None of the other normal algae eating snails (astrea, turbo, margaritas) are resistant to hermit crabs. However I do have a few banded trochus snails in with the hermits and they seem to be fine, probably since they are bigger than the crabs, move pretty quickly, knows how to flip itself over if it falls and are too strong to pry off.
Hermit crabs won't go for a living snail if it doesn't need to. It only goes for it if it needs it's shell or it's hungry, and they seem to be hungry a lot, if the tank is bare.

Aside from a hermit crab, there isn't a snail that can take hair algae that's grown in, except for the sea hare, which is a giant or a sea urchin which is pretty big also, but the urchin starts small and is also limited to the short hair algae. There are tons of people who use have crabless clean up crews.
 

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