Cleaner Clams Group Buy

So at the DIY Food meeting today, I brought up a subject that was spawned by a conversation with Mitch of Booyah's Clowns. He is using Cleaner Clams on his systems, and on his frag/anemone tank, they cleaned up his tank so well that his anemones got choked off and slowly died, so he has to severely overfeed and still has no measurable N or P. This was done by getting a dozen clams from the supermarket (for less than $10) and putting them in a trough in his tank. He is now using these on his clownfish breeder tanks for the same purpose.


You can also buy them from saltwaterfish.com at 5 for $15 http://www.saltwaterfish.com/Cleaner-Clam--Group-of-5_p_5420.html and this is what I am suggesting we do, either that, or figure out where they buy them from and go direct to there.


I thnk it's worth a try.


I did a bunch of reading, positive and negative, and you can do so as well by just googling "Cleaner Clam" and start reading. Be warned, there is a lot of misinformation and unnecessary red-flag-waving (based on such misinformation). Most of the threads I found were quite old, strangely enough, but the longest threads (on SWF) were full of positive reviews and much good information.


These are essentially filter feeders. They are regular old boring clams, bivalves, mollusks, etc. The go by the names hard clam, quahog, northern quahog, little neck clam and cherrystone clam, etc. You can find these in grocery stores dirt cheap, on ice, they are alive, and you can acclimate them to your tank as described in many old threads in the interwebz. But I think one would be taking a slight risk in buying these, unless they were purged (look for some corn meal method of making them regurgitate or something) and quarantined or something like that.


Anyways, they do not consume inorganic nitrates and phosphates (which is what we test for), but rather remove particles (food, or organic N and P) from the water and incorporate into their tissues. So you could think of them like little natural skimmers with no bubbles, no light requirement, only a gentle water flow requirement.


Some people say that they work great, and you need roughly 1 for every 5 gallons of tank water, and others say you need much fewer than that depending on your system. If they don't have enough food, they die.


You can put them directly in your tank and they burrow in the sand bed, and you'll never see then unless they die, at which point they come to the surface and open up and become food.


It also sounds like you can put them in the sump but would have to check them now and then in case one dies - in which case it would release it's nutrients for tank inhabitants or the other clams to consume anyways.


Regardless, these would just be one additional component of filtration in the tank, not something to be relied on for primary filtration.


It should be mentioned that Mitch (Booyah) told me that Steve Tyree used clams as filtration before skimmers were used. So this is not some concept I just pulled out of nowhere and not some old fad, it does work.


If anyone is interested, let me know and I'll start making some inquiries.

 

Nice, and still alive after 8 years? Did you have hermits or other crabs?

 

I don't think they affect calcium and alkalinity uptake like giant clams, because they are not photosynthetic. But I could be wrong. Supposedly, Tyree used them on heavily fed SPS tanks with great success. Mitch said he feeds a ton and can't get N and P readings at all.

 

So the clams you get here are likely raised for warmer temps, whereas the ones in the grocery stores may or may not have come from coldwater locations.​

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Dunno about quality other than that​

 

I think that may be one of those indefinite sales. Prob not a huge rush.

 

Ok so to recap, here would be the possible group buy if we were going to do this tonight as Matt is suggesting:

Chris C.: ?
Matt/Ninja: 35 clams
Dave: 10 clams
Sponge: ?
daalbers: 10 clams
Me: 10 clams

So that's 65 for sure, that's 13 sets of 5, that puts the buy at $194.87, so I added one to put us over $200 and get free shipping

But then the 10% off code drops it back under, so I bumped it to 15 sets and we're right at $202.36, I'm guessing that a few others would take the extras.

Now the question is, who wants to be in charge of this? I'm kind of burnt out on the DIY food and scrubber backlog so Matt if you want to take the reigns that would be awesome.

Also remember that this place is in Florida I think, so the order might have to be placed by 10:59pm our time