A good day and a bad day

P

patteto

:D The good - managed to eradicate 3 bad crabs and coral eating shrimp from my tank.
:sad: The bad - I realized that I have lost 2 of my anthias fish recently.

The Crabs:
I always knew I had a couple of crabs in one of my corals but I never thought much about them. Then today I see a third in another coral but this one is twice the size of the other ones. I can also see they all have evil blue eyes and fuzzy bodies. So out they came.

You can see one of the two in the center of this picture, note the blue eyes.
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The Coral Eating Shrimp
I got this coral about a year ago and noticed over time that it seemed like the coral was disappearing from the inside out.

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Recently I fragged a piece for Tony. The intent of fragging a big piece to was open up the center of the coral and see what was going on. Well today I saw some movement in the coral so I pulled it out to investigate.

The white are is from the frag.
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I found what I thought was a crab at first but turned out to be a shrimp. It was about 3/4" long
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The big claw come off when I removed it from the rock. I was able to break apart the plug the coral was on to get the shrimp out versus tear up the coral.
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The Fish

Below is a picture of the fish that I cannot find in my tank tonight. Maybe they are hidden in the rock with some eggs but I doubt it. I am really going to miss those fish. I orginally had 4 and am now down to one female. This is the first fish I have lost in 8 months. :sad:
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Anthias tend to evaporate. They just vanish, one by one in my tank. Sorry you go through that too.

Good job with the crabs and pistol shrimp. Good pictures too.
 
Sorry to hear about that Todd. That's interesting about the crabs/shrimp eating your SPS. I remember thinking that it was something that we couldn't see, turns out they were right there in front of us.

Chris
 
I was lucky in catching the crabs. The corals they where living in are not attached but more wedged into the rock work. So I was able to take the corals out of the tank and get a pair of tweezers and pull them off the corals. I had to use the bone crushing snips (from frag class) to get the shrimp.

Thanks Marc on the pictures. I have been having some problems lately getting good pictures. I think it is mainly impatiences on my part.

Good to know that the shrimp is probably a piston shrimp. Now, I just cannot wait for that coral to heal up.
 
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