crab ID (1 Viewer)

[frankc]

This guy came in an Acro colony I got a couple weeks ago. It's kind of cool with the blue stripe around the head, but don't know if it's friend or foe. It's about a quarter inch wide. I just lost a beautiful Scott's fairy wrasse I got at the same time, and it had a hole in the side of its head, but not sure if that's what killed it and if it came from the crab.

I looked at a few sites to try to identify it, but the only ones that looked close had eyes more in the middle rather than at the far corners.

 

[Cody]

When in doubt, toss it out. Or better yet, make fish food out of it.

Weigh the pros and cons. If its friendly, then you have a small, basically insignificant addition to your clean up crew. If it's foe, then it will kill/eat other living things in the tank.

I understand it's difficult for some people, myself included, to smash in a crab's head with a hammer to make food, but the reality is that the food you feed your fish every day is made of dead animals. When you have dinner, it's because animals died. Even if you're a vegetarian, there's a massive death toll on critters simply to farm. If you kill the crab and feed it to the tank then at least it benefitted the other critters in your tank, and didn't die for the sake of it.

 

[Team Turtle]

Looks like a banded eye acro crab...very beneficial

 

[frankc]

Looks like a banded eye acro crab...very beneficial

Thanks, that definitely looks like what it is. You can even buy them online for $25 or more, and mine was free! It's odd that I caught him walking around the middle of the QT instead of in his Acro home, but I guess they need to explore sometimes. Apparently they prefer Pocillopora, Stylophora, or Seriatopora to Acropora, so maybe he was looking for one of those. If he gets tired of his current home (or it dies as way too many Acros do in my tank), he will have the option of a pretty big Seriatopora colony once he gets to the big tank.

 

[RR-MAN]

@frankc
We got the same acro - I dipped mine and 2 of the same crab came out. I put them in my nano.

 

[paraletho]

Looks like a banded eye acro crab...very beneficial

Good ID. My general rule black claw tips, hairy body not good. Spoon tip claws, trapezoidal body, flattened body worth a second look.