Does Algae Grow on Your Crabs?

[ajkochev]

I'm going to start off by saying I don't have a algae problem(knock on wood).  Oh, I get the usual film on the glass and I have cheato in the refugium I trim once a month.  But my bare rock work has nothing on it, always clean to the naked eye, and no hair algae or diatoms in the sandbed.  The one place that does have  algae is my poor porcelain crab.  She looks great just after a molt but a week later brown diatoms form on her and then they turn to hair.  I feel bad for her but don't know what to do.  She is active and always eats well.

 

Is this normal?  If not what can be done?

[j.falk]

I've never seen a porcelain crab with diatoms growing on it.  Do you have a pic?

[ajkochev]

Pic of the crab, as you can see from the bare rock areas I got no algae on them, just the crab.

 

[WV Reefer]

8 minutes ago, ajkochev said:

Pic of the crab, as you can see from the bare rock areas I got no algae on them, just the crab.

 

Looks normal to me. They can look rough just before molting. 

[ajkochev]

And just like that, an hour after I took that photo above, she molted and is squeaky clean again.

 

[mndfreeze]

Mine were the same way when I had porcelains

[Tired]

Yeah, seems to be pretty common for porcelains. A lot of them will have some amount of brown algae on them. It doesn't seem to bother them any.