Today on the MarineAndReef.com Budget Tank Build Series we add a cleanup crew to my office aquarium. You may be asking what a cleanup crew is and if I want one. A cleanup crew is the invertebrates that help clean up messes in the aquarium. It's primarily shrimps, urchins, crabs, and snails. These are going to eat uneaten food that the fish miss. Maybe anything that happened to die in the tank as well as little bits of algae. There are a lot of different animals you can pick to incorporate into your cleanup crew. We're going to show you guys what we're adding to the tank.

WHEN DO YOU ADD A CLEANUP CREW?
One big question people have with a cleanup crew is when do I add them? We recommend that you don't add any cleanup crew until you notice things for them to clean up. With this new tank, we're starting to get some algae on the rocks. We're cleaning the glass more frequently in this tank. These are signs that there is enough stuff that this cleanup crew can start cleaning up and eating. If you add the cleanup crew too early where there's nothing for them to eat, they're just going to starve and die, and that's going to make everything worse because you have more rotting stuff in your tank. It's going to get dirtier. It's not going to be a good situation, so you want to wait until you start to notice some algae and uneaten food building up. That's where we're at now.

HOW MANY SHOULD YOU ADD?
You want to add approximately one clean-up animal for every 5 to 10 gallons, and we'd recommend you start on the low end of that. Then, if there's still stuff to clean up, you can add more gradually.

1. NASSARIUS SNAILS
The first ones I'll add are some nassarius snails. These snails are carnivorous snails. They're going to live in the sandbed, and they wind up eating any leftover food. These are not an algae-eating snail. They eat any food that goes to the bottom or anything that happens to die, and they're one of my favorite snails. You'll see a theme in the stuff I picked out is that I hate constantly replacing cleanup crew members. Nassarius snails tend to live a lot longer than a lot of other cleanup crew animals. You can easily get five years or more of life out of them whereas other snails you're only going to get a few years out of them.

2. BLACK SEA URCHINS
Next up is a black sea urchin. Black sea urchins are good at eating hair algae in particular, which is long stringy algae. There are a lot of different urchins to pick from, but this one is one of my favorites. The general rule with urchins is all of the urchins with stubby spines tend to be coral eaters and all the ones with sharp spines tend to be safe with coral. This one we picked out here is a short spine urchin. We have another one of these in an office tank--it's been there for over 5 years. It is a very long-lived cleanup crew animal. Something that I like about them.

3. TROCHUS SNAILS
The next thing we're going to show you is one of the more traditional cleanup crew animals. These are trochus snails, and in my experience, these rarely live more than 2 to 3 years, but they are excellent cleaners of the glass and the film algae. These guys sometimes can have a hard time flipping themselves over. So I'm not simply going to dump them in like I have the nassarius snails. I'm going to try to place them on the rockwork or in the right direction. This way they won't get flipped. If you notice one that's gotten flipped over, you'll want to flip them back because they do struggle to flip themselves. Trochus snails can flip themselves over easier than other snails, but they can't always do it on their own.

4. CLEANER SHRIMP
Lastly, I have two cleaner shrimp. Cleaner shrimp are kind of on the edge of what I'm going to call a cleanup crew animal. They're good at cleaning up but they're also just cool. You could almost view these guys just as a regular livestock member. What I like about cleaner shrimp is they will eat any leftover food. If you ever do any broadcast feeding of dry food or frozen food the cleaner shrimp will happily eat up whatever's left over, but they also will clean fish they actually will climb on to fish and eat any parasites off of them. With the one I just added the tank, I think he's a little interested in cleaning off that damsel there. So, they're a great cleanup crew member when it comes to helping prevent disease in the tank as well as cleaning up any leftover food.

Hopefully, you enjoyed what you saw today. If you like what you saw today, then go ahead and subscribe to the YouTube Channel. We'll have more videos on this tank. We're going to add coral soon. We're going to review our equipment. We're going to show you guys some upgrades that we do over time on a basic tank like this.