Gall Crab eggs

Dsnakes · Jan 17, 2018

Found this little fella out of his hole in my Acan colony. First time I've ever seen it out. Plugged its hole with large tweezers and grabbed it with small ones. Then noticed it had what seemed to be a yellow egg sack under it.

I have only ever seen this one. Does anyone know if they produce eggs whether they are fertile or not? Hopefully I don't have any more in there. Thanks for the help in advance!

#reefsquad

saltyfilmfolks · Jan 17, 2018

I dunno, do gall Crabs get gravid?

Gareth elliott · Jan 17, 2018

The gall crabs you find outside of a coral are normally males, though some gall crabs live in more shallow divot than a true gall. Males are much smaller than females, and during breeding cycle go looking for a mate. Eggs usually hatch in the female’s gall and become platonic and land on their new home, and through some biochemical reaction cause the new coral to make a gall. Yours could be the showing mature ova or perhaps its stomach full of food. I read through a lot of studies on them when i found one on my pavona coral. So only knowledge from reading a lot. I killed mine after i noticed a large area of damage near its gall.

Dsnakes · Jan 18, 2018

Gareth elliott said:
The gall crabs you find outside of a coral are normally males, though some gall crabs live in more shallow divot than a true gall. Males are much smaller than females, and during breeding cycle go looking for a mate. Eggs usually hatch in the female’s gall and become platonic and land on their new home, and through some biochemical reaction cause the new coral to make a gall. Yours could be the showing mature ova or perhaps its stomach full of food. I read through a lot of studies on them when i found one on my pavona coral. So only knowledge from reading a lot. I killed mine after i noticed a large area of damage near its gall.

Thanks for the info! I did read up a little bit after posting this. I'm fairly confident they were eggs, hard to see in the picture but they were distinct perfect spheres. Hopefully caught them before anything released from what I read they couldn't have been too far along if they were fertile.