Elegance pest

Fishboyz · Jan 2, 2020

A few hours ago I had picked up a nice looking elegance from a LFS. The coral had been there for almost a month and looked beautiful. I took it home, drip acclimated, dipped and put the piece in my 125 gallon reef.

About an hour ago from now I had spotted some claws coming from the elegance's base after the lights went out. I was terrified at what had managed to get in my system. I immediately removed it and started another aggresive dip. When I was dipping a second time I had noticed a hole in the skeleton, like something had burrowed in and decided it was time for some surgery.

After about 30 minutes of digging and proding I had managed to pull out a decently sized pest. Looked like a tick with a meat sack on it.

Thing is nasty looking but if it wasn't so hideous I wouldn't have noticed it. It had a little cap covering it's burrow so at first I had thought it was just part of the skeleton but after poking at it enough I noticed so give in the structure.

I'm just glad I got the sucker out. I think it's a gall crab but it looks to meaty to be a crab to me. After getting the thing out I put my elegance back in the tank, but not before another dip of course.

As I'm typing this one of my snails has started hanging out where the gall crab used to be. My hopes is that the snail is eating any dead tissue left over from the crab.

I hope my elegance will have a quick recovery. This was my first ever "surgery" and hope to not have to worry about it again.

Fishboyz · Jan 2, 2020

Update on the elegance:

Seems to be opening up just fine. If anyone had any idea what that hitchhiker was I'd appreciate the feedback.

Rainblood · Mar 14, 2020

Bump. How did your elegance do?
I just pulled a similar thing off of mine. I didn't realize that it was a tick, I thought it was just a dying part of the elegance structure.

wildcard · Jun 5, 2020

I found one of these too. I just picked up an elegance last week. I’m really glad you posted this. I’ve never done a surgery and was reluctant to, thinking it was just a part of the coral. I have never had an elegance, and mine wasn’t showing claws or much at all, just showed a little movement there from time to time. They are hell of sneaky, whatever they are, I had to wait and stare without moving for a couple of minutes to catch it move even slightly. I did eventually see a little claw poke out though, which is what made me finally look it up. It does look like a sealed up hole when not in motion. I plan to operate tomorrow! I would say it’s a gall crab. I saw a video a couple of days ago about removing them when I was looking more casually for an answer but think I was in denial that’s what I have since it looked so gross. Thanks again, wish me luck!