Urchin isn't eating my algae!

[+KeeperOfTheZoo]

I bought a cute little royal urchin hoping it'd be a good algae CUC member. Well, it ate the very small patch of hair algae I had in the tank and is refusing to eat what I think is derbesia. I noticed this morning it ate a path through some coraline. :/

If it's gonna refuse to eat the derbesia how and what do I feed it to help encourage it not to munch on coraline?

It's a neat little critter so I don't want to get rid if it. I don't want it to starve either. Haven't found much info about feeding urchins aside from their supposed fame for mowing through algae. Apparently mine didn't read the mass algae consumption memo.

Liz

[NonSequitur]

Unfortunately your experience matches with mine.. my urchins (I have a royal urchin that has been carrying around a stalk of xenia for well over a month and a pink pincushion urchin that prefers to carry hermit crabs) really love coralline and the short brown algae that grows on the rocks that the blennies seem to love as well, but won't touch derbesia. They seem to keep the tanks free of most other microalgae, and will usually eat nori if nothing else appealing is available, but half the time they don't eat it and just carry it around instead. If you've never watched a rabbitfish try to eat nori off of the back of an urchin you're missing out.

[+KeeperOfTheZoo]

Lol! You're gonna have me convinced to get a rabbit fish. I just left RCA and they have a big one. Really like the coloration.

Well, I guess it's good to know my urchin isn't alone in slacking. My kids are waiting for it to pick up something interesting, so far it's just hauling around CC and little shells. They are keeping a running count on how many pieces it can carry at once.

Liz

[+dapettit]

They eat both. I would get a lawnmower blennie.

[teg]

I had the white urchin before, it really love coralline, seems like he prefers that algae over other stuff. The "carrying things on its back" was fun to see at first, but gets annoying fast. It became a time consuming task of removing the frag from its back and place it back to original spot.

[Starsprinkle Rainbowsmile]

LOL NonSequitor, how's the urchin doing? Still carrying around various critters, eh?

Regarding the lawnmower blenny, are they difficult to keep alive once the algae is gone? I heard they don't take to prepared foods nearly as much as they like and need a good amount of live rock to feed them.

[NonSequitur]

He's doing really well.. and doing a really good job of keeping the coralline off of the glass.. right now he has a couple of shells and a lot of caulerpa (he's in my small tank at the moment because the coralline was getting out of control), but he's carried xenia, zoas, snails and hermits, small rocks.. you name it, if he can lift it, he's carried it. It'll be a lot of fun to watch once I move him back into the big tank and the rabbitfish decides it wants to eat his camouflage.

[+Hydro]

I got a new pincushion urchin, its small and pink, pretty cool. I have tons of coraline algae so I wasn't worried about it cleaning me out b/c it will grow back faster than the urchin can eat it.

In my experience hair algae will not grow where there is coraline algae, so what has been a problem now is that as soon as the urchin cleans an area hair algae instantly begins to grow there. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it, I like the urchin but hate hair algae.

Mine carries around the thermometer, it makes it hard to see what temperature is...lol

[JamesL]

You have to keep in mind too, a lot of urchins are rock borers ... I had some pencil urchins that liked to eat through the rockwork, coraline, rock, and all.