What are these Crabs?

[JM5]

We are seeing more and more of these crabs..They have very large pinchers that lay to the sides of them and they hang out in the rocks waving what looks like paddles? They seem to keep to them selfs, but we do seem to have a lot of them? Would anyone have any good places to find pictures to help identify these guys?
Thanks for your help!!

 

[fishfreek]

You can check out the following website to see if maybe they have a photo of what your seeing.

http://www.reefs.org/hhfaq/

Im not sure what you have unless its an emerald crab or something. The only crab that I know of that has paddles use them for catching small food particles in the water but I did not think they had pinchers.

 

[JM5]

Thanks so much! We have several Anemone Crabs!!

 

[reefrunner69]

Sounds like a porcelain crab.

 

[JM5]

Well now that first picture does look a lot like the ones as well? Are these crabs safe for our 110 reef?
Since we are talking crabs!! We also have had 3 "hairy" crabs with large claws, we have removed them , and our LFS took them. We do have one more in our tank to catch ! What are these crabs? I was told they are not good in our tank, but don't know what they are?

 

[reefrunner69]

Lots of crabs are hairy, some are questionable, some are bad, these sound like hitchiker crabs that are best viewed as "better safe than sorry". The porcelain crabs are safe, their claws are more for show/defense than anything. They are filterfeeders.