i was moving some live rock around o catch a tang that is under the weather and qt him to fatten him up and when i moved a rock i shook a red hairy crab with black pichers off it. i have never seen this crab before but from the looks i wold say hes a bad one. he was between .25 and a .50 piece. any idea of what it is?
Were the pincers pointed or rounded on the ends? I have not ever seen good hairy crabs for sale at a LFS either.
If it wasn't red I would say it was a gorilla crab fairly common in live rock. I have some now I am trying to catch. This pic has some red tinting to it. If this is what you saw you need to remove it from your display. They can and will catch and eat your livestock if it gets a chance. Typically if it has the pointed claws like this they are bad but if they have the rounded like a porcelain crab they are safe.
very close to that pic. i am not sure i can catch him without removing 200 lbs of rock to do so. the odd thing is i just put all that rock in that tank a month ago and i never seen him then. all of my fish are pretty good size except my two clowns but they stay away from the rocks anyway. i thought about trying to smash him as he was running cause he just looked bad but i have a thin layer of sand in the tank and i didnt want to break the glass.
they are quick. When I originally added my rock to my 135 I had a bunch of them in there. I used the water bottle trick to catch them. just take a watter bottle cut the top off, invert it into the bottom of the bottle. You also need to punch some small holes in the sides of it for waterflow incase you catch something you want to keep. I tie some fishing line on mine to help adjust it and easy to pull out and put a small rock in it to weight it, throw in a tasty treat they cant resist and it shouldnt take too long to catch it. I have seen quite a few posts were people stated they used a skewer to get them but I am pro life. When you catch it just throw it in your sump.
I always heard that crabs with pointy pincers are bad for a reef tank. Its an easy way to distinguish between good ones and bad ones.
hes way to big for a water bottle. i dont know how i have missed him this long. his mid section alone is the size of a quarter.
It's claimed they will eat the pollips on your corals, I had one hitch hike in my tank on some rock I added, he would hide out in a hole in the rock, so when I new he was in there I just pulled the rock out with him on it and threw him in the sump.
