Sally Lightfoot hell!! Help please!!

T

TimL

New member
I made the dreadful mistake of adding a tiny Sally Lightfoot crab in my reef to take care of an algae problem that never happened in the first place.

The tiny crab is now a HUGE monster after devouring 350.00 worth of fish.

How can I remove this crab? I have tried the trapping in a bottle/glass. This only resulted in the capture of my brittle and serpant stars.

I've tried netting etc.......pulling the tank apart is not an option. Do I just have to wait for it to die?

Any help please........
 
Re: Sally Lightfoot hell!! Help please!!

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=11760653#post11760653 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by TimL
I made the dreadful mistake of adding a tiny Sally Lightfoot crab in my reef to take care of an algae problem that never happened in the first place.

The tiny crab is now a HUGE monster after devouring 350.00 worth of fish.

How can I remove this crab? I have tried the trapping in a bottle/glass. This only resulted in the capture of my brittle and serpant stars.

I've tried netting etc.......pulling the tank apart is not an option. Do I just have to wait for it to die?

Any help please........
Click to expand...

That is so so so bad!!!!
Try catching him at night.
>Good look.
 
Sally Lightfoot

Sally Lightfoot

I Had the same issue. What I did was placed one small live rock by itself and when I saw the crab under it, clinging to the underside, I simply lifted the rock up and pryed him or her off. I also was able to accomplish this in the daylight hours. Good luck.
 
That's insane!

That's insane!

I've never heard of this happening before. I have always had sally lightfoot crabs in my tanks and currently I have one with 4 clown gobies, 2 neon gobies plus other bigger fish and I've never seen it try to mess with them.

Goodluck with catching it. You need a Mantis shrimp to take it out.
 
I've seen tons of cases where Sallys have cause big problems.

If the bottle trap didn't work, I would seriously keep at it until you catch the lil' bugger. If you keep catching the stars, I would put the stars into your fuge (if you have one) after you have caught them. Then toss em back into the display once you have the crab caught.

Other methods are going to be really extremely difficult. Goodluck spearing a sally if you try, those things are incredibly fast, and very intelligent.

I'd keep with the bottle trap, only other feasible option would be to remove the rockwork.
 
Thanks!

Thanks!

Thanks everyone for the ideas. I will give 'em a shot.

He ate:

mated pair of percula clowns: 125.00

watchman goby
mandarin goby

royal gramma

pair of mis-bar clowns (percula replacements)

2 yellowitail damsels

pair of occelaris clowns (mis-bar replacements)
I actually saw the crab catch one of these with the lights on.

there are more but my notebook is at home!

All that is left is my longnose hawk which is safe cuz it sleeps on my koralias at the top of the tank!
 
I've one that's about 1.5" and everytime a fish swims by the SLF would stick their claw out to take a swip but so far I haven't seen any harm done but at the same time I wouldn't be surprise if it does nip a fish.

Generally I see it hang out at one particular rock more so than other so if you can try getting that rock its on out quickly may be your best bet.
 
I've had the same problems with those. Luckily, I only had a damsel at the time which was too fast for him. I removed all my rockwork but it was a small tank.

Try feeding flake food - it floats slowly but should catch his attention and try to scoop him out with a net
 
to get mine out back in the day i put a peice of krill in a net and waited for him to go in the net and scooped him out, took about a hour for him to finaly wonder in there though
 
4d38.jpg
 
Get a metal BBQ skewer with a nice point at the end. Put a piece of shrimp on the tip. Lure the crab out to get the food. You know what to do next...
 
How large is this Monster Sally?

Maybe add some kind of fish that eats crabs? Maybe a mantis shrimp?

....there was an old woman who swallowed a fly....
 
Tim- I have the same problem. My sally at my Yellowtang 3 weeks ago and ever since I have been attempting to catch him.

I have trided the krill on a stick...I have tried to stab him with a skwer.... I have tried the bottle triick...

I have accepted that Sally is just smarter than me. I am sure I will try again soon. hopefully I can pick something up from this thread
 
I had a Sally Light foot in my tank. I have to say it was my favorite critter. It made quick work of any fish that exhibited any signs of weakness. Unfortunatley it started to eat some of my healthy fish - slow unsuspecting swimmers.

Sally Light foot are good detrius and refuse eater. It's primarily a carnivore and very much an opportunistic eater.

I caught mine by rigging a trap with a clear specimen container - you know one of the containers your LFS guy uses to pick out fish for you. I layed it on it's side in the front of the tank, put some sand and a few pieces of stones in it to keep in down in the tank and camouflage it. Then put some irresitible food pellets in it. I had long spare piece of plexi that I sat on top of the container above the opening. Then the waiting game started.

He crawled in within 5 minutes of setting the bate. Crawled all the way to the back then I slid down the piece of plexi. Only thing was I didn't work my leverage to cover the opening and then get the container out of the tank. He slipped out after he realize it was a trap.

I set the trap again. This time it took 15 minutes before he crawled back in - the greedy bugger. This time I was read. Got in position and slid the plexi of the opening and pulled it out the tank.

I took it to my local Petco. I have to admit I was a little depressed. It was one of the most interesting critters in my tank but I could not afford to keep it
 
I had to take out almost all the rock on one end of my tank to get Sally out. This was after she eat three clown fish.
 
I never had a problem with mine, I've had my Sally almost three years now. He will come out and eat pellets from my hand, he's my little buddy.
 
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