Emerald crab?

Okay, I brought an emerald crab home today. He's acclimating right now. We'll see how this goes. If it turns into a disaster, Jwin will have to capture him!

 

One thing that was recommended to me by a guy that works at my LFS was to place the crab by hand in the area where you want him to start feeding on the bubble aglae from the get go after acclimation. It may be hit or miss, but I tried it and sure enough the crab went to town on the bubble algae within a few minutes of staring at it.

 

I have a couple small emeralds in my 75, bubble algae isn't a problem now and they are fun to watch. I have played tug-of-war with them when I put seaweed pieces in by hand!! (I always win)

 

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that. My little emerald LOVES little seaweed pieces. He takes them right out my hand which surprises me and he'll even play tug-of-war with it. I would have assumed he would run away if I stick my hand in there. At least I know I can trick him into a game of tug-of-war if I ever need to get him out of the tank.

 

I have tried two emerald's. Never had bubble algae, so couldn't answer you there. But they were always fine around the corals, with no issues what so ever. But like Peredhil, I could never sustain one for very long for whatever reason.

 

I had a couple emeralds that took care of my valonia problem, I got them fairly small. They didn't last long though, about 6-8 months each. They can be a pain to catch though, they have death grips on the rocks. I used to feed them small bits of krill to keep them from trying to pinch my fish. My first took a nice sized chunk out of one of my damsels.

 

Tug of war with a crab - that's cute! I don't know where he is today. The lights are still off. The six-line wrasse was bugging him yesterday - he showed the claw of power!

 

I found the crab! I figured he was hiding in the rocks, but found him in the right "eye" of our face rock. It was an old piece of base rock that we thought looked really neat, so we put it in the front. It's covered in coralline now and has the feather duster wedged between it and the rock above it (it's "hair").