Need An Idea On A Crab, No Clue What It Is.

[vonjankmon]

Saw these at my LFS today and neither I nor the guy at the store knew what they heck they were. Picture is not great but it's the best my cell phone camera would do. It looks like it's a filter feeder as it has the little filter appendages but the shape didn't look right for a porcelain crab. You can kind of tell in the picture but it has red and white stripes going across its body.

It looks neat and I would like to get one but my 55G has a pair of seahorses so I have to be very very careful about getting anything that may grab onto them when they're hanging about so I'm not buying anything that I can't identify.

Hope someone knows.

 

[youngfisher]

Doesn't look to friendly to me.

 

[three-fingers]

Doesn't look to friendly to me.

Why not? It's a species of porcelain crab .

I can see the filtering arms, and only 3 pairs of walking legs are visible - so yup, that's what it is .

 

[youngfisher]

Im not saying its not friendly, I just dont think it looks friendly. Im not a fan on these.

 

[three-fingers]

...fair enough, not an invert lover then lol.

It's totally friendly though, reef and fish safe, may even eat some algae for you .

 

[youngfisher]

I have hermits, which came with the tank I got today, and a emerald. Im not a fan of the hermits as they are a PITA crawling over corals, thats my experiance in the past. Emeralds are not bad - they keep themselfs to themselfs. Im a fan of snails and shrimps though

 

[scott133]

can only think of two

red mithrail crab

strawberry crab

not too sure because of the pic but google those too and see if it matches with that crab

you never know i could have came out a bit of rock or coral so there could be loads of posabilites

regards scott

 

[vonjankmon]

It's not a strawberry crab it had strips instead of the dots. Could be a porcelin crab I guess but I've never seen one with the coloration of this one. It's definately a filter feeder so does anyone know any other filter feeder crabs other than porcelin crabs?

 

[three-fingers]

It's 100% a porcelain crab, there are loads of different colours and more species than there are photos of on the web...

So colour is unimportant, the claw shape, filtering arms and most importantly 3 visible pairs of legs as opposed to 4 make it fairly easy to ID from true crabs (porcelain crabs aren't actually crabs, so it couldn't be a filter feeding crab).