5ish months in, thought I’d do a little update for anyone interested because his tank has really come along.
I’ve found that once I let him make his structures and move things where he wanted (he honestly set up like half this tank lol), he stopped ripping up plants and everything else so much. Kind of like a one month period where he just tore up everything and remodeled the house. His strength is ridiculous, he carried live rock from one side of the tank in his saltwater pond into the freshwater pond


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Everything is natural/real. Freshwater pond has snails and aquatic plants/pothos growing in it. Seeing little pods darting around in there too. Almost like a blackwater tank from all the leaf litter and coco fiber that he’s dragged in a broken down, fully cycled at this point.
Then he has a cycled saltwater pool with aragonite sand/beach, chaeto macro algae for nutrient absorption, live rock, and nessarius snails which burrow in the sand and pop out when you throw food in. Nice for keeping the sand aerated.
Then a lot of what’s growing is pothos growing from cuttings off our house plants and a variety of sprouts/corn(grows great and sucks up the water that fills up in the drainage layer).
He tends to like eating plants as they decay like leaf litter, so stuff will get pretty high and he will cut some down and it’ll disappear over the next few days. I also throw in a huge variety of foods which he nibbles, but mainly likes living off what’s growing in there.
CuC: tons of springtails, colony of A gestroi isopods for the colors, they tend to burrow under stuff too, and some “land shrimp” somewhere in there. Planning to grab some dwarf isopods to add once weather warms up a bit.
The crab by the looks of it has been thriving. Getting a lot of purple and blue colors and acting …crabby… hangs out around his mega tunnel system during the day and explores/swims at night. Doesn’t show any signs of stress to my knowledge and seems content.
plan is to set him up in our basement in a nicer display maybe like 90-125g with a deeper substrate and more polished pool/beach sections by siliconing glass in rather than setting in small tanks(I hate the black rims too). Maybe try my hands at some polygem zoopoxy as well… another idea I have is to take a roll of cocofiber, shape it, and plant monsteras or similar above so the roots could grow down through the screen into the tank. This tank has all just been a rough draft, throwing things together for the fun of it… I gotta say it’s been a blast. Now that I know his behavior I can set up something nicer.