Wodesorel said that she started with a similar setup but it was too hard to keep clean, but mine seemed to be ok, so I didn't worry about it too much. I had Malaysian trumpet snails, gammarus, and Opae'ulla as my clean up crew.
BUT THEN, we had to evacuate from our home due to wildfire. Our home didn't burn, but a pipe in the kitchen broke due to the water hammer effect from the firefighting and when we were allowed to return to our house, it was completely flooded. So, we had to move into a hotel and I took my crabitat with me. (My 3 fish tanks went to friends' houses.)
Everything was still ok at the hotel, but after 2 weeks we moved into an apartment (the repairs on our house probably won't be complete until September. Ugh!) and had to move the crabitat again. It got sloshed around a bit in the car and by the time we got it into the apartment, it was a bit smelly. I thought it would sort itself out and settle down, but every day it got smellier and smellier until it was so stinky it kept me awake at night, from the other room! Yuck!!
WODESOREL WAS RIGHT!! There is simply no way to effectively clean that type of setup. There were anaerobic patches in the sand, which was always flooded, and the sandy bit underwater couldn't be vacuumed so solid crab waste just accumulated, even with a clean up crew. Speaking of which, all my Opae'ulla died a few days after we moved into the apartment. I guess they didn't like the smell either!
So I rebuilt my crabitat last Friday. First I purchased a new 20 gal long tank:
And got some "egg crate" plastic grating from the DIY store to make a raised platform. My husband cut it to fit the tank and cut some PVC pipe as "pilings" to hold it up.
We covered the egg crate with landscape fabric rather than screening because the sand I got ("Desert Sand" sold for reptiles) was very fine.
I then put in the gravel and the sand, but oops!! The sand fell down between the grating and the glass, so I siliconed between the landscape fabric and the glass, then put the sand back in.
I added some sticks and shells , filled it with water and added the crabs.
They quickly found their own shells and tussled a bit until everybody settled down.
However, I noticed that they didn't like the sand very much. It stuck to their bodies and they would take a few steps on it, then scrape it off, then after a few iterations of that, run back to the water.
So Tuesday I went to a local stone & building material place and bought a bigger grain sand. When I told them I only needed 15 pounds at most, they just went out and filled up a big bag with about 25 lbs and gave it to me, calling it a "sample"! I traded out the sand in the tank and have seen lots of crabs on it with no scraping or running back to the water!
Fine sand:
Courser sand:
I also decided to upgrade my filter. I had been using a small sponge filter, but found a filter made for paludariums and other shallow water environments.
It looks like it's going to work well.
http://youtu.be/q6we20xAS5g
BTW, I started with 11, but 2 died fairly quickly after I got them. Then for a long time I thought I had 8 because that's all I could ever see. I figured that there had been a 3rd death, but I never found the body, they probably ate it. Then after another month or so I could only find 7, figuring another cannibalistic attack.
Well, when I moved all the crabbies into the new tank, I found not 7, not 8, but NINE crabbies!! Yayay!!!
Oh, and I emptied the old tank into my compost bin.
So there you have it. Bottom line: WODESOREL WAS RIGHT!!
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