barnacles.....good or bad

[D.J.]

one of my blue leg hermits has a barnacle on the top of his shell....

should i leave it or pull him out and kill the barnacle.....i know they can be bothersome and devastating in the wild but dont know about captive ones....

and yes my crabs is right from the ocean.....got him fresh off the boat, so to speak!!!

 

[Fishieness]

Nope. They wont do any harm. WIll just filter feed. Dont do anything bad and dont filter enough to be really good. I'd be more worried about the crab being aggrassive... what type of crab is it?

 

[Charlesr1958]

That would actualy depend upon if the barnacles are able to reproduce successfully in your system, and if they do, where they settle. I have seen barnacles in an aquarium attach to coral heads and over time cause the loss of the coral. Thankfully the odds are against their being successfull as they would/could cause the same fouling problems that ships and ports have to deal with.
Oh, and I agree, I would be a lot more worried about a free ranging crab, very destructive little buggers.

Chuck

 

[D.J.]

hes a blue leg hermit.........when i bought him the LFS told me it was from a new supplier......they have since then switched.....

i also pulled the crab out and killed the barnacle.....i looked on the net and seen a tank that had been over run with them......

 

[journey0820]

I'm probably going to get bit in the behind later for saying this but...I think we can all get a little worked up about things we find in our tanks out of fear. The fear is justified in about 1% of cases and over the top in the other 99%. I totally respect your decision to remove the barnacle but I'm thinking more philosophically about our need to CONTROL so much of what generally will work itself out on it's own. Only the horror stories make it to the internet and we base our fears on them like they are the "typical" cases. I just realized I'm not really posting about DJ here, but all of our tendencies to remove those things we are unsure of. Maybe I'll start a post about this sometime so we can wax philosophical and all that. Sorry to think out loud in your thread.