Peppermint shrimp eating my pocilopora

[P-Nut]

The other day i got a really nice pocilopora from a fellow BRS member. Two peaces broke off, so I placed them on plugs. the first day the peppermint shrimp jumped on one piece (they always dop this on new corals), I thought they were jsut cleaning it, but the next day it looked dead. For two mroe days the bigger piece was fine, and i woke up alst night and saw all 3 shrimp on it at 3am...well, today 90% of the polyps are gone.

before you ask, I feed the fish every day and the shrimp eat every day, so they are not starving. they avhe been in the tank for 3 months.

2 questions:

1- How do I catch them?
2- Will a cleaner shrimp also attack some hard corals?

everything else is doing fine in the tank.

 

[kingfish62]

Buy a large dottyback, he will set them straight. A simple bottle trap may work. Can you isolate the coral in a jar with some wedding veil on it to keep the shrimp out for now ?

A coral banded shrimp may take out the pepermint shrimp too and they are reef safe as far as I know.

 

[THE WOOKIE]

make a bottle trap and throw some silversides or mysis in there and they will hop right in and you can pull them out

 

[beckbrass]

Pepermint shrimp are usually considered reef safe. They are know to nip at infected corals and could have been cleaning it up. Sounds like you did not have the coral long and may have just been dying and the pepermints were cleaning up damaged areas. People typically complain of problems on Lps not Sps though and again usually can be attributed to infected coral or camel shrimp, Easley confused for pepermints when young and known to eat Lps.

 

[P-Nut]

Pepermint shrimp are usually considered reef safe. They are know to nip at infected corals and could have been cleaning it up. Sounds like you did not have the coral long and may have just been dying and the pepermints were cleaning up damaged areas. People typically complain of problems on Lps not Sps though and again usually can be attributed to infected coral or camel shrimp, Easley confused for pepermints when young and known to eat Lps.

The coral was healthy. Not dying.
I did a search online and found many people with the same issue

 

[Alex]

Weird I've never heard of Peps attacking healthy sps.

 

[beckbrass]

Two peaces broke off, so I placed them on plugs..

Any time a coral is fragged or broken the flesh can take a while to heal and can get infected. This could have caused flesh to rot. That's all I was saying. It's also possible they went after the coral but not typical especially on sps

 

[Ruge13]

I agree with the above, most likely not the shrimp. Those corals were doomed, shrimp were just doing their job... then again anything is possible. If there is one truth that this hobby consistently reminds me of it is that after years of having a successful tank I still don't know jack about a reef because it continues to surprise me.