peppermint shrimp tore up new hammer coral..any chance it can recover

wherenext · Feb 17, 2017

OK, so I just bought a new 2 head frag of hammer coral. I dipped it, acclimated it and added it to the tank. Within 15 minutes it was nice and fully opened, looked great. A few hours later, I see one of my 3 peppermint shrimp tearing the hell out of one of the heads, pieces flying away and it definitely eating the tentacles.

He got a little of the other head but not near as much. So I removed all 3 peppermint shrimp, put 2 in the fuge, and the one I caught tearing it up ticked me off and became food for my puffer fish. Is there any chance this hammer coral can recover? There is still a little flesh left In the one head but looks like mostly skeleton, the other head didn't lose too many tentacles but definitely retracted after being attacked.

Fish Werx · Feb 17, 2017

I just had this occur to me in my system a couple weeks ago... I got a cleanup crew package from a company and since I bought the upgraded package I got 10 free peppermint shrimp with the order. Now, I know for a fact they were peppermint shrimp as I did bookoo research because I read somewhere that camel shrimp look similar, but could be a problem... That along with the fact that I had some in a past system to combat aptasia (victoriously I might add)...
Soon after adding the newest PS I noticed that one head of my huge frogspawn colony was severely retracted, beyond the normal " a fish bumped it while swimming by" kind of retracted. Upon closer inspection I saw the same thing! A PS munching on the polyp head and surrounding tissue!
I, as quick as I could manage in a 120G reef tank, removed them all and some became sump residents and the largest one became fish food!

The head of frogspawn halfway recovered... I guess it was close enough to splitting that one side actually made it. It is now almost as large as the rest of the surrounding polyps, but you can see that it is only connected on one half of the skeleton.

So, I guess the point of this is dont remove the damaged coral until you see if it will or will not make it? Hope for the best, these corals seem to be pretty dang tough!

wherenext · Feb 17, 2017

Thanks. I am pretty sure the one head one the left will recover, it didn't get too much off of it and mostly just retracted. The one on the right though he really decimated, I can see a few tentacles and see flesh in the middle, but looks like a lot of bare skeleton. I will keep my fingers crossed. I don't see this color variety of hammer often at my lfs, and was excited to get it. It was satisfying to atleast to see the little sucker get eaten by my puffers. I will give it awhile before doing anything with it. I at least have a little hope now it might recover.

Fish Werx · Feb 17, 2017

Yeah, you can see some tentacles and flesh like you said, so I would hold a hope for them definitely. I have seen miine retract so far you coldnt see any flesh or anything. But they came back... So its just a waiting game. And it ALWAYS happens to the ones you like best! Its like the other inhabitants can tell or something! LOL!
Also, "Welcome to the forum"!

wherenext · Feb 17, 2017

Thanks. Read a lot of stuff on here but first thing that freaked me out enough to want to make a post. Unfortunately I didn't catch it sooner. It was seeing the guts from the right head floating off from across the room that caught my attention.