Gall Crab

[JBReefer23]

I bought an awesome elegance coral, and was doing fine for a couple of days. Than I noticed a speck of orange color, did not think too much of it, until the speck showed movement. Looks like I got a hitch hiker, Oh crap!....and than it got worse, I had two of them inside the elegance coral. Double crap!....and noticed they looked like crabs! I was able to remove one w/ a pair of tweezers, but the other was buried too deep. I used ReVive to try and get the crab out, it did work and got the crab out. But too bad, it was too late, the elegance coral did not make it. What do you think, was it the crab that did it in?....or was it the parameters of the tank? or both?

 

[C. Eymann]

Catalaphyllia can be a challenging coral to begin with, handling the coral (trying to remove crabs manually) can cause stress in addition to any stress caused by the crabs, then compounding stress with a dip like revive can sometimes be too much.

Its difficult to point a finger at one specific variable.

 

[flsalty]

As my vet used to say, the surgery was a success but the patient died. Gall crabs don't cause harm.

 

[Gareth elliott]

Gall crabs are rather immune to dips ime.

I did have the opposite experience with gall crabs and a pavona(a far less delicate coral). A one inch diameter circle around the grab slowly lost tissue over the course of a week, was i even noticed the crab was there. Since was a pavona, i ended up using a very tiny drill bit and killing the crab that way. Crab survived a dip in reef dip and bayer that i was using at the time.

I am unsure if was eating the pavona or the act of eating the mucus had irritated it enough to lose tissue, coral rebounded after i killed the crab, with no other changes. I lean towards the latter of my hypothesis on what it was eating.