Tigertail Sand Eating Cucumber - Holothuria impatiens
Picture taken January 2000, Nikon Coolpix 950 digital camera, full flash, no tank lights

Purchased: June 4th, 1999 Nickname: Leapy

Sand Eating Cucumbers play an important role sand bed maintenance. They eat the sand particles with little to no destruction to the fauna living in the sand. This tigertail eats the sand and digests the bacteria off of the sand and leaves piles of clean sand behind it (see below). After digestion, the sand is ready to be recolonized by bacteria.

Sand cukes tend to hide during the day and only come out at night. This picture was taking during the early morning hours before the lights came on.

Tigertail Sand Eating Cucumber - Holothuria impatiens
Picture taken September 1999, Sony Mavica FD91 digital camera, full flash, no tank lights

This tigertail has already doubed in size since I got it. It can easily reach 2 feet across and I think it could go more if it wanted to. This critter moves an amazing amount of sand and is highly recommend for sand beds made of fine particles.

During August 2000 this tiger tail cuke split into two halves. This seems to be a very common time of the year for tigertails to split. When they split they tend to hide for several weeks as one grows a mouth and the other grows an anus. While mine was spliting I added a tail-end of a split cuke from a friends tank. So I now have three tigertail cukes.

Tigertail Sand Eating Cucumber - Holothuria impatiens
Picture taken September 1999, Sony Mavica FD91 digital camera, no flash

Here to the left you can see a pile of fecal pellets left by the tigertail from the night before. This pile is about 2 inches tall. Previous pellets have already broken apart only the most recent ones still have shape.