I have at least 3x mussels that have lived in various tanks for the last year, and not all of them dirty tanks either. I’m pretty sure they came on a live rock from Premiere. I was under the impression there wasn’t enough nutrition for them in our reef tanks to survive Has anyone else kept them successfully? It would be great to know I’m wrong assuming they couldn’t be kept.
Mussels
- Thread starter Mick
- Start date
That’s really interesting. I’ve been digging into a lot of reading on inverts lately, and mussels have definitely come up as one of those species people often say can’t be kept long term. So it’s cool to hear you’ve had some hanging on for a year. From what I’ve gathered, their survival usually comes down to whether they can get enough of the right food consistently.
They’re not just phytoplankton feeders. Mussels are pretty indiscriminate filter feeders and will pull in whatever’s suspended in the water column. That includes live phyto, microzooplankton like ciliates or flagellates, bacterial clumps, and fine detritus. They’re often found on wave-beaten rocks, dock pilings, and other places with really heavy flow that keeps all that stuff constantly moving past them.
That’s part of why they’re so hard to support in tanks. A single mussel can filter as much as 17 gallons of water per day, so if there’s not a constant source of microscopic food in suspension, they’ll slowly starve. I suspect that in a lot of cases when people report them surviving a few months, that’s just how long it takes them to run out of reserves.
Something that might help is if you’re running a refugium with chaeto or other macro. Occasionally shaking that out and letting the trapped detritus get recirculated should provide a natural boost in organics and microfauna. That kind of “fuge dust” is something I only recently learned isn’t bad at all. It may actually be ideal for feeding mussels and other filter feeders.
That said, while I think they’re super interesting from a filtration and invert behavior standpoint, I haven’t come across anything suggesting they fill a critical ecological niche in reef tanks that isn’t already covered by more sustainable options. If I wound up with one as a hitchhiker, I’d absolutely do my best to keep it going, but for most tanks like mine - especially with lower bioload plans - I don’t think they’re a great fit. I have a feeling there are key microbial food sources they need that we just can’t maintain without a level of biodiversity most tanks can’t keep up long term short of directly piping in seawater.
Still, I’d love to hear more about your setup and how you think yours have hung on as long as they have. This kind of firsthand observation is exactly the kind of thing I’ve been trying to find more of.
They’re not just phytoplankton feeders. Mussels are pretty indiscriminate filter feeders and will pull in whatever’s suspended in the water column. That includes live phyto, microzooplankton like ciliates or flagellates, bacterial clumps, and fine detritus. They’re often found on wave-beaten rocks, dock pilings, and other places with really heavy flow that keeps all that stuff constantly moving past them.
That’s part of why they’re so hard to support in tanks. A single mussel can filter as much as 17 gallons of water per day, so if there’s not a constant source of microscopic food in suspension, they’ll slowly starve. I suspect that in a lot of cases when people report them surviving a few months, that’s just how long it takes them to run out of reserves.
Something that might help is if you’re running a refugium with chaeto or other macro. Occasionally shaking that out and letting the trapped detritus get recirculated should provide a natural boost in organics and microfauna. That kind of “fuge dust” is something I only recently learned isn’t bad at all. It may actually be ideal for feeding mussels and other filter feeders.
That said, while I think they’re super interesting from a filtration and invert behavior standpoint, I haven’t come across anything suggesting they fill a critical ecological niche in reef tanks that isn’t already covered by more sustainable options. If I wound up with one as a hitchhiker, I’d absolutely do my best to keep it going, but for most tanks like mine - especially with lower bioload plans - I don’t think they’re a great fit. I have a feeling there are key microbial food sources they need that we just can’t maintain without a level of biodiversity most tanks can’t keep up long term short of directly piping in seawater.
Still, I’d love to hear more about your setup and how you think yours have hung on as long as they have. This kind of firsthand observation is exactly the kind of thing I’ve been trying to find more of.
I had some that came in on some Florida live rock that lived at least 4-5 years including a full move, and possibly even reproduced as I saw some new small ones. I had a dino outbreak and as I got the dinos under control the mussels died. They grew quite a bit, from about 1/2" to almost 2 1/2". I did not exactly run an extremely clean tank. They seemed to flourish when I was running a skimmer only and no filter sock on a long established multi tank system. I only had a few (about 10 over 1 1/2") in a 500 gallon system. I would suggest trying only a few in a larger system. Enough to noticeably improve water clarity would probably eventually starve them as normal tank cycles of nutrients and plankton levels change and the mussels grow larger. If your system can support them pretty healthy, they will outgrow the system if you have more than a few, then they will start to starve.
It wasn’t the dinos that killed them. Well, sorta it was, but...
Dinos are really more of a symptom than a cause. They tend to take hold when nitrate and phosphate bottom out and biodiversity drops. They’re opportunistic, fast-growing, and can be toxic, but they also don’t do well when there’s both adequate nutrients and a strong microbial community competing with them.
That said, another way to look at it might be that it was the mussels, along with your corals, macros, skimmer, and everything else, working too well. If all that uptake bottomed out your nutrients, that could have triggered the dino outbreak in the first place when nutrients dropped too low. And depending on what species showed up, they may have released toxins or physically irritated the mussels by coating their shells or gills. That kind of stress could easily make them less resilient to any changes made to clean up the system.
So while fixing the dinos may have made the water cleaner, the mussels may have already been compromised at that point - either directly by the dinos or just by the sharp shift in available food and microbial balance. I'd have to guess though that they were already starving by the time the dinos showed up, and even if the dinos didn't contribute directly to their demise (which they certainly didn't help) they were probably nearly done for by that point.
Either way, your experience is super helpful. Getting mussels to survive and grow that long, even in a large system, is no small thing. The detail about how they did better during your skimmer-only, no-filter-sock phase really helps fit some pieces of the puzzle into place.
I agree; it was possibly not the dinos directly, but fighting the dinos involved cranking up on mechanical filtration and changing my nutrient levels. My nitrate went to zero, and the dinos exploded, and my other plankton crashed. When I dosed the nitrate up to fight the dinos, it worked to get rid of the dinos. But a lot of my other biota and algae changed around in levels substantially (but briefly). It took a few months to get my algae types back to more normal for my system, and by the time that was over, the mussels had died.
It could also be a more direct effect as dinoflagellates do have toxins that can accumulate in shellfish and have negative impacts on their health. The "red tide" is when you can't eat oysters and other filter-feeding molluscs due to accumulated toxins from dinoflagellate blooms that accumulate in the molluscs. As natural (or man-caused) algae blooms that happen in the wild can kill or weaken mussels, it is not inconceivable that my aquarium plankton could have become toxic. Bivalves have some natural tolerance to the toxins, and usually the problem comes from humans eating oysters that have eaten too many dinos. But again, my dino problem was pretty bad, and it easily could have become most of the diet of my mussels for a while. Not all dinoflagellates are extremely toxic, and I am far from an expert in knowing what happened, but many of my snails died at that time as well.
It could also be a more direct effect as dinoflagellates do have toxins that can accumulate in shellfish and have negative impacts on their health. The "red tide" is when you can't eat oysters and other filter-feeding molluscs due to accumulated toxins from dinoflagellate blooms that accumulate in the molluscs. As natural (or man-caused) algae blooms that happen in the wild can kill or weaken mussels, it is not inconceivable that my aquarium plankton could have become toxic. Bivalves have some natural tolerance to the toxins, and usually the problem comes from humans eating oysters that have eaten too many dinos. But again, my dino problem was pretty bad, and it easily could have become most of the diet of my mussels for a while. Not all dinoflagellates are extremely toxic, and I am far from an expert in knowing what happened, but many of my snails died at that time as well.
