Little critter living in my open brain coral

[Brooke80]

hi everyone this is my first post ..so my apologies if it's all over the place !
but my tank is only thriving so well because of so many nights reading helpful advice on this forum so I thought I would give it a go myself.
I have noticed my open brain shrinking away from its skeleton lately so I have been keeping a close eye on it as this coral is one of my favorites ( It has always had damage its tissue was torn in the LFS and never closed up fully but took it home anyway as I thought it looked interesting ) Then I noticed one night looking at my coral doing some nocturnal investigating that something moved Inside the walls of the skeleton So off I went searching the forums and came across " gall crabs " well after reading a bit about these guys and seeing my open brain clearly struggling open brain surgery commenced !!! I will attach the pics of after I pulled the bugger out and the hole it left !!! It took some prodding and pulling with some dental tools but got it out in the end
after the surgery my open brain has immediately started to close over the skeleton and is not as stressed hopefully it will go back to being the pride and joy on the sand !

 

[fastrd400]

Very nice save. Good that you researched it.

 

[Becky]

Hello and welcome aboard! Nice save :thumbsup:

That second photo is lovely, you should check out the Photo of the Month competition - the theme this month is Corals!

https://www.livingreefs.com/threads/february-photo-of-the-month-corals.50358/

 

[SantaMonica]

Nice little crab for the fuge :)

 

[Brooke80]

Yep he was a funny critter ...... but now my open brain won't open up over the hole and seems to be fairly distorted , I wonder will he repair and grow over the skeleton again ? I can't feed him anymore because his mouth won't open over the damage from the crab. The pic shows how his tentacles will stick to food but it is unable to place it in his mouth . The bits of prawn are exactly what I used to feed it each week . Not only that it is completely covered in what I think are amphipods ..... Every night and this seems to create a lot of bother as it retracts and will not put tenticles out . I hope it's not on the downhill spiral !!!! I am just unsure of what to do now !