My tank

[Hajra]

Teddy bear crabs. i am told that i dont want them however i have two and no problems as of yet. though have had them for a bit and no missing fishor anything as far as i can tell. Any ideas or tips etc. very much appreciated. already looked online and never know what info to trust.

[Just_Greg]

i can't see it, but Bill's description suggests that it's a Dardanus sp. hermit...are we talking hairy red legs with white spots?  if so, these crabs get big and will indeed eat snails, fish, and anything else they can get ahold of, esp. after they get some size on them.  just want you to be informed.

[Bergy]

if you zoom in on the second picture you can see it... it is blurry, ok, it is a blurr spot

but i can tell, (at least i think i can tell) that it is the white spotted hairy legged giant crab...

they arent totally agressive, especially if youfeed them... but asyou can tell, they are big enuf to catch a lot of things...

they are cool but destructive...  i had one for a year until i couldnt take picken up after him anymore... and then he was exiled to sump monkey status, hehehehehe


i gave him away shortly after and heard he died soon after that...

i guess he really missed my tank...

[Just_Greg]

back in my early reef daze, i was told this crab was OK, but i soon found out otherwise.  i ended up tossing it into the tank i exiled my 15 year old snowflake eel to, and i'll be darned if the eel didn't finally yank the sucker from its shell to eat it.  mine was the size of a baseball.

[Hajra]

There are two hermits and that i know of they dont have any white spots on their legs. they arent very big right now. about the size of a quarter

[Bergy]

then what is that big old blur in the middle of the picture???   dang your pictures suck out loud dude... (that plus my eyes are really REALLY bad)... i had lazik surgery, (twice), and it didnt work out and now i wear glasses that barely work/correct the new problems the surgery caused.


and yea, i should a known better then to eff with my eyes, especially knowing the type of luck that surrounds me

[Just_Greg]

dang your pictures suck out loud dude...

i just thought it was me who couldn't see anything...

seriously tho...you need to figure out what min. distance your camera focuses at and don't go any closer.  a close-up isn't worth much if it's fuzzy.  take several pix of the same spot and pay attention to what the distance to the subject is, then use that as your minimum.

[OCtrackiepacsg1]

I don't think the picture is that bad...I think we've all been spoiled with Greg's beautiful pictures.
I don't see the huge hairy hermit your talking about, but I think I see the teddy and the Unidentified crab from the last thread.

[Bergy]

like i said, my eyes are totally screwed.. but this picture is different then the picture posted... did you clean it up somehow???

[OCtrackiepacsg1]

no, I just put it on paint, drew on it and reposted it on photobucket. Its smaller though

[Just_Greg]

I don't think the picture is that bad...

there isn't ONE spot on the pic in focus.  that being said, if you look at the castle spires, you'll notice a double image, so this is a case of not holding the camera still while shooting, or choosing too slow of a shutter speed/too small an aperture (which causes the camera to choose a slow shutter speed) to hand hold.

all i'm trying to do is help folks shoot better pix so we can see what they are referring to as well as enjoy their tanx and critters.  if nobody offers constructive criticism, we never advance in our skills.

[Bergy]

agreed... communicating these types of comments is difficult at best as people sometimes have think skin or seem to take things personally...

PLEASE DONT... PLEASE

no one here means to hurt you or your feelings... if you do have some misunderstanding or believe people are being personal or going too far, let us know and you will see a bunch of apologies flying as i know everyone here...

that being said... hopefully you understand that taking pictures is not 'natural' or automatic... these types of shots are called macro picutres and although you can take nice pics of flowers and fruites and things like that  but taking pics of our fish is more diffic ult as cameras sometimes focus on the glass/acrylic  and having moving fish 

all of which the use of shutter speed and aperature a more tricky problem

the good thing is that because it is digital, it doesnt cost you anything to take a few hundred pictures to get one good one...


another big tip will be to get a tri pod....

that will steady teh camrea and let you worry about the other variables...

[Just_Greg]

the good thing is that because it is digital, it doesnt cost you anything to take a few hundred pictures to get one good one...

you all only see Renee's pix that she deems good enuff to share.  i can tell you that for every pic you see, there are SEVERAL that don't pass muster.  granted, her pix are taken with max quality (each jpg is about 26 Mb), but she frequently fills up 8 Gb flash cards during a few sessions (if my math is right, that's 320 pix per card).  she opens all the pix of a given subject and starts tossing them out for whatever reason, focus being the #1 criterion.  for instance, for pix of fish, she goes right to the eye, since that is where your eye is drawn first.  if the eye isn't in focus, the pic is trashed.

as Bill mentioned, a tripod is your #1 friend, and IME can make an iffy camera look pretty good.

[OCtrackiepacsg1]

Oh yeah, where is that hermit you were talking about?

[Hajra]

pic correction. lol. the one inbetween the castle is a hermit. the other is a emerald crab. the un id crab died when i quarenteded him to stop the killing of my other tank mates.