emerald crab having babies??????

[tat2tillidie]

i thought i lost my emerald crab but now i have a small one that kind looks brownish. i never bought one that small so i know it didnt come from me and i havent added any new corals. so is it emerald or could it be a pest?? its legs are hrry but it wont come out far enough for me to se all of its body or take a photo

 

[cdangel0]

I don't know if it's an Emerald or not, but it's probably a better chance that it came in as a hitch hiker and just recently came out or has grown big enough to see.

Only time will tell if it's a pest or not.

 

[tat2tillidie]

well its def a emerald crab but its so tiny like the size of a pinky nail

 

[a1amap]

I have to agree with cd0 on this one. Crabs don't reproduce by themselves. And if your crab had eggs when you got it you would have seen it before now. Probably a hitchhiker crab from the garf grunge you got.

 

[tat2tillidie]

i put the grunge in my sump and the emerald is in the display and now i see 5 of them

 

[Jocephus]

I found a mantis in my five year old rock about a month ago, sometimes the hitchers are very hard to see. But who knows, maybe they did reproduce. If you get more, I'd be interested in taking a few off your hands.

 

[Gordonious]

I've never seen a brown Mithrax, but there are over 30 species in this genus. We have had red and green ones in the store I work at and I have seen images of a white one, but its body looks different then that of the typical emeralds.

In most cases I would say that people don't feed enough plankton for the possibility of small crab larval to develop, but I've seen how much foods you have fed in the past and know you have a large amount of live zooplankton living in your tank. There have been some people who have raised the young of some of these crabs. It is possible, but like everyone else said it's more likely they were hitch hikers.