Yellow sea cucumber

Care at a glance

Overview

The yellow sea cucumber is a small, peaceful filter feeder for an established reef tank. It is not a first invertebrate, and it suits a keeper with some reef experience.

Caring for the yellow sea cucumber

Keep the yellow sea cucumber in an established reef of at least 11 gal (40 L), not a newly cycled tank. It needs real planktonic life in the water column. It settles onto live rock in low to moderate flow. Once it finds a spot it likes, it tends to stay put, occasionally moving a short distance.

Hold the water at 75 to 81°F (24 to 27°C) with a pH of 8.1 to 8.4, and keep its quality stable. Like other cucumbers, it does not tolerate a fast change in salinity, so drip acclimate it over an hour or more.

It is a filter feeder that depends entirely on supplemental feeding. Give it one or two feedings a day of phytoplankton or other fine particulate food. Release the food into the current well upstream of it, since dosing it directly just makes it clamp shut.

It is reef safe, since it does not eat coral or bother tank mates. Avoid housing it with triggerfish, puffers or other bold fish that might peck at it. It shares its family's holothurin toxin risk if it is crushed, sucked into a pump or dies of neglect. Screen every intake in the tank.

Good to know

Colochirus robustus is a small filter-feeding sea cucumber in the family Cucumariidae. It has a stout yellow to orange body covered in short conical papillae, and a crown of ten branched tentacles for catching food. It feeds by sweeping suspended particles out of the water with its sticky tentacles. It wipes each one across its mouth in sequence, the same feeding method used across the filter-feeding cucumbers.

In the wild

Yellow sea cucumbers come from the western Pacific around Indonesia and the Philippines. They anchor to rock and rubble in areas with steady water movement and extend their tentacles to catch passing food.

Common questions

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