HeHe... Good luck fellas... patience is right! I spent the better part of a year trying to figure out what was eating leather corals in one of my accounts... Something was snipping chunks of leathers off and devouring entire pieces bit by bit over the course of a week or two... then moving on the the next.
I finally spotted the culprit hauling an entire stalk of spaghetti leather up into a rocky den at the bottom of about 4 ft of liverock. It was a teddy-bear crab, about the size of a $1 Canadian coin. After trying a couple of off-the-shelf traps that the crab just played with (in and out at will); I resorted to the time honoured technique successfully used in the past to catch a mantis shrimp out of a 450g tank. An inverted top bottle trap... I got a 3.4L fruit juice bottle; cut off the top at the base of the funnel; inverted it; and sewed it back together with some fishing line/silicone etc. It just so happened that the crab took a 2 month hiatus to moult, but it eventually went for the free-bee [bait] leather in the trap, and I found him sitting there with a guilty look on his face the morning I went in to service the tank...!
But just so you know, they don't always go for the bait in a matter of days... sometimes they take weeks to months.... Enjoy the process, as I'm sure you'll experience the same adrenaline rush [I did] when you finally see the bugger in the trap!
