High Tide Aquatics

The Bone Collector

Jruga

Jruga

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So for the past 6 months every new chalice, monti and acro frag I've purchased has been sucked into the black abyss of "WTF where did it go?". Tonight I _finally_ caught the culprit. A crab almost 2" inches in diameter that must have come as a hitch hiker in the live rock I used to set up my tank almost two years ago. I've only see glimpses of this guy over the past 12 months and had _no idea_ it had gotten so big!

There's actually a pile of dead coral skeletons and frag plugs under the spot where this guy has been living. It also had a taste for my green star polyps (it would carve off 1" square swaths of them, never to be see again!... if anyone has a GSP problem they're welcome to him!).

Tonight I came home from a night of visiting with friends and checked my tank, after the lights had gone out. And to my wildest surprise there it was... sitting next to the biggest colony of GSP that I have... the crab I have been calling the "bone collector" for nearly a year now. Out in the open! I was stunned!

I ran to get my net and a stick and put it underneath him and chased him in! And viola! After a year of losing brand new frags from multiple sources. It's finally out of my tank! I can barely contain my glee at the thought of being able to get new chalice and acro frags without worrying about them ending as food for the "bone collector"!

Now if I could only get rid of the pesky black crabs so I can have Zoas again! (I'll never use real live rock to start a reef tank again!)
 

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It's neat looking. Maybe a species tank for it, or at least a safe spot in the sump. Maybe it'll eat Xenia, they could feed the crab and export nutrients.
 
You can give it to lfs and make a trigger fish very happy with a crab dinner. :) Happy to hear you caught it and amazed this crab would go after live corals like that.
 
There ya go DBTC - Crab edition, pass it around to every reefer who wants to get rid of GSP... note: might take corals you actually want to keep with it :D
 
I actual thought about killing it. But since I've not seen this kind of crab before, I've decided to put it into my algae grow out fuge and see what else it eats.

So far in my tank (before I caught it) I've seen it take GSP, and small frags (seems to like chalice). I used to have some Xenia in my tank and it disappeared. Good chance it ate them. And the occasional green palythoa goes missing (not sure I can attribute that to this crab).

But it also appears to have a taste for starfish. I had to pull out a tile star and a green brittle star after I caught it pulling the legs off and eating them :-(. Hopefully it will eat asterina stars.
 
So it eats corals AND pet starfish?

Isn't this a gorilla crab or some close relative? Make sure you can easily remove it from the fuge. And to not accidentally give someone the crab when giving away algae lol

This guy gave me a ball of chaeto before and two peppermint shrimps swam out of the ball wen I put it in my fuge.
 
Enderturtle said:
So it eats corals AND pet starfish?

Isn't this a gorilla crab or some close relative? Make sure you can easily remove it from the fuge. And to not accidentally give someone the crab when giving away algae lol

This guy gave me a ball of chaeto before and two peppermint shrimps swam out of the ball wen I put it in my fuge.
Click to expand...

I actually have been looking into that. I find a lot of information online classifying anything that eats Zooas as "gorilla crabs". And yes, I'd say this falls into that generic category. However, what I have seen posted as images of "gorilla crabs" in reality spans a large number of crab species (every thing from neopetrolishes, to emerald crabs. to black shore crabs, to box crabs, to indo-chinese hairy crabs). So I can't totally dismiss it as a "gorilla crab" (do a search on google for "gorilla crab" and you'll see only about half of the images describe the black carapaced animals that we think of as "gorilla grabs").

I'm more inclined to think this is a some sort of "box crab", "hairy crab" or "stone crab" which are common to the region where my live rock came from.

I do have plenty of the "gorilla crab" like those photographed here: http://www.reef2reef.com/forums/new...re/188666-finally-caught-my-gorilla-crab.html and this one is different in both morphology and coloration.

I really wish I knew more about these "hitch hiker" creatures, as they're not all detrimental to reef fauna without some reason (e.g. I wonder if some of them that destroy certain things are actually doing us a favor and we don't know it - like those that eat GSP or Xenia!).
 
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