How to kill a vermitid sanil...

[X-Treme]

So.... I bought a small frag of Poccillipora(sp?) almost a year ago and it came with a vermitid snail. I asked about it back then and was told "don't worry, the pocci will just grow over it". Well, needless to say, here we are almost a year later and all that has happened is the snail has grown along with the frag. How do I "remove" it from my life?

[Marlin65]

You should be able to just break them off if you want with a pair of side cutters.

[kwirky]

smush it to utter smithereens (shell & all), those suckers grow back like aiptasia

[Drock169]

i treat them like aiptasia, joes juice into their hole, it seems to kill them

[brizzo]

smush it to utter smithereens (shell & all), those suckers grow back like aiptasia

They will over run your tank if you don't snuff them out. I use a good hobby knife to cut/pry their body off the rock. At one point I had hundreds in my tank....

[MikeP]

I had a big one on the side of a coral once. I covered him up with some underwater epoxy.

[X-Treme]

Well..... I can't but him out at all, because he is TOTALLY embedded into the coral. I'm sure his shell is 1/4 of the base of the Pocci.

[christyf5]

You can do one of three things:

1. get some thin but stiff wire and shove it down the last of the hole that you couldnt' destroy. Its a worm so making him mush will kill him :wink:

2. clip the coral off at the part where the worm lives, then clip the worm part off. now you have a frag you can grow and sell (if you're interested in that sort of thing) or another frag you can place somewhere in the tank.

3. (variation of #1) try either poking him with fine tweezers or destroy as much of his worm tube as you can and then get at him with the wire


just destroying his tube doesn't work, they'll just grow it back. you have to actually get to the worm inside and either pick him out or make a gory mess of him. I hate vermetids and had them spawn all over the place when I left one to hang out in my capricornis cuz I couldnt' get to him. At one point I had 6 on one of my clams.

[Hairytank]

I was able to solve my Snail problem with a flathead screwdriver and a hammer...fortunately for me and unfortunately for the snail, it was growing out of a thinner piece of live rock. I simply chisled him off.

[kwirky]

if it's one of those big fat vermatid's then christy's recommendation of the wire should work.

[Delphinus]

Man were you given off advice to leave it be. :neutral: Following that advice myself my tank got so overrun with them at one point it was disgusting to look at because all you could see was those spider web things they put out.

All of the suggestions above will work. If busting off the tube, be sure to cut below the snail's body. They can retreat a fair way's back into the tube, so if you don't, all you're doing is giving it a haircut.

I've injected them with kalk to some degree of success.

Failing all other measures, take a wad of underwater epoxy and cover them.