Porcelain crabs for sale for saltwater aquariums.

Get porcelain crabs to add to your clean up crew to help maintain clean rock work and substrate.

 

The Porcelain crab has a flat, round body with two large front claws.

 

 Porcelain crabs are easy to keep and hardy. These crabs are great algae eaters and aquarium cleaners. 

 

Free shipping for Porcelain crabs.

 

 Porcelain crabs are a great addition to the clean up crew and will keep your live rock and substrate clean of nuisance algae, cyano bacteria, left over food and fish waste. Porcelain crabs are a compliment to the clean up crew along with Amphipods and Tisbe Copepods.

 

 

Porcelain crabs have specialized front arms called maxillipeds, which have ends that are like sieves or tiny nets that they use for filtering the water for plankton.

 

 Porcelain crabs are very interesting to watch as they sift the water for plankton with their hands/ appendages.

 Porcelain crabs are peaceful and reef safe coral safe and interesting invertebrates for the marine saltwater reef tank aquarium.

 

Green Porcelain crab.

 Size: ¼” – 1/2 “.

 

Porcelain Crabs live together in pairs and will set up their house on your live rock in your reef tank.

Porcelain crabs will also eat meaty foods when you feed your fish and corals.

A great food for Porcelain crabs is our ANF Coral Extacy Amphipod Food Hatching Food, which contains the organisms that these crabs are used to eating in their diet in the wild reefs of the ocean.

The flat and compact body enables the animal to hide in between rock crevices and beneath stones. It is also found in between tufts of macro algae, corals, sponges, and mussels.

Porcelain crabs love to hang out in chaeto macro algae and other saltwater plants.

Porcelain crabs belong to family Porcellanidae, infraorder Anomura, and order Decapoda. These crustaceans are classified under 30 genera that have around 300 species. They are commonly found in all oceans, except the Arctic and Antarctic. The body color of this crab varies with different species, and may range from blackish-brown to sky blue, green, and white. While some are spotted; mottled or striped species are also common.

Porcelain crabs are often found as heterosexual pairs that breed throughout the year. It is said that females become sexually mature as they attain a body length of around three to four millimeters. The male deposits sperms inside the female, and the latter carries eggs in a brooding flap located in the abdomen. The eggs are usually reddish-brown in color.

 

Porcelain crabs are fascinating marine organisms with amazing features.

 

Porcelain crabs have feathery structures on their mouth parts that look like arms. To be precise, the outermost pair of maxillipeds have fan-like structures.

These crustaceans indulge in filter feeding using these feathery extensions.

Porcelain crabs diet mainly consists of Copepods and Phytoplankton, which they collect from the water, through sweeping movements of their arms. The mesh-like structure works like a sieve for collecting food.

Porcelain crabs are also great scavengers which makes them and ideal addition to your clean up crew. Porcelain’s will scrape nuisance algae from rocks and substrate and they have occasionally been seen eating cyano bacteria.

Porcelain crabs will find and eat left over fish food and coral food that falls into crevices in the rocks and on substrate which if left uneaten will decompose and produce toxic chemicals such as phosphates and nitrates in the saltwater aquarium reef tank.

This habit that porcelain crabs exhibit helps to promote water quality by breaking down organic material before it has a chance to decompose if left laying around undigested.