What Killed My Snail? with pic

[StirCrazy]

Originally Posted by reef_raf

Exactly!! I had one of these, killed snails a couple of times a week.

ya, in the damn rock you gave to me

Steve

[andestang]

Originally Posted by Beverly

Anthony,

Definitely will kill the thing if it comes out of the rock

Would love to catch all the snails in the tank, but there are over 60 of them (remaining ) in a 120g. Gonna be too hard to catch them all, though. And only have a 37g up and running to put them in.

Got the kalk/RO mix already heated. Am ready for Chris to walk in the door pretty soon, so we'll be at it for awhile. Hope that evil monster snail slimer comes out is all I can say

I sense a little anger Good luck Bev - do post some pics if you get it in one peice or so

[Beverly]

Had everything set up for the kalk mix/tankwater bath for when Chris came home. Three parts kalk to two parts tankwater. pH 10.20, didn't get salinity.

Bathed 4-5 rocks separately in the bath for at least 15 mins each, powerhead and heater going. Killed some mysids and a small bristleworm. Saw no sign of the killer worm

Decided our venture was a failure and talked about what we could do next. Since we do not know which rock harbours the bad guy , we chose to set up a 5g, put a suspicious piece of rock and a snail in it, and wait for a snail (either in the 120g or 5g) to be killed. Sounds cruel, but, dang, they're dying anyway

If we happened to pick the right rock right off the bat and the snail in the 5g is killed and slimed, into boiling water the rock will go and we'll re-cycle it. If a snail in the 120g is killed, then we remove the rock from the 5g and replace it with one from the 120g. We will keep switching rock until we get the killer worm

Seems like a lot of freaking trouble, but neither of us are up in the night to observe which rock the worm comes out of. Too bad it wasn't active during the day or I'd get the little baddy

BTW, the shrooms and button polyps came out of the experience alright.

Anyway, that's my update

[Aquattro]

Bev, I found my worm lived directly where the empty shells were.

[Beverly]

Good, Brad, because that's the rock that's now in the 5g with the snail.

The strange thing about that rock, and several others we have in the 120g, was that they came from a tank heavily infested with valonia. Tried as I might to get rid of the stuff, it just kept coming back twice as bad as before

To finally rid the rock of the valonia, I boiled each rock for 5 mins, essentially killing EVERYTHING on the rock Put the dead rock in my trusty 20g to recure it, then used it as base rock in the 120g when we eventually set it up. It doesn't make sense that there would be a worm in it, not after all that boiling. I wouldn't think worms would move from rock to rock if it already has a pretty good home to begin with.

Oh, well. We'll wait and see.

No dead snails this morning, but I doubted there would be after seeing how picked clean the snail I found yesterday was. Worm probably put on 10 lbs eating that snail and can't get out of its hole

[muck]

Any luck yet Bev?

[Beverly]

Ryan,

Haven't had the chance to take down the reef and inspect the rock. I'm not in a big hurry right now to do it, have many things on my plate until the end of the month when my daugher is getting married

Don't think the worm is all that hungry seeing as it just devoured a whole snail just a few days ago. When I look back on the snail deaths in that tank, very few were slimed. I'm hoping there will be a break in slime deaths, at least until we're able to spend time on that tank.

BTW, no other snail deaths lately for other reasons

[Samw]

Hi Bev.

Did you ever find your snail killer? Recently, I've had dozens of Trochus snails die that I've had for years. Last week, during the day, I saw a zebra hermit and some bristleworms eating a freshly dead snail. Just now, I am watching a zebra hermit and some bristleworms eat another freshly dead snail. Then I remembered what happened. The snail that they are eating was a snail that I knocked off the glass with the cleaning magnet just hours earlier. I knock snails off the glass often when I'm cleaning the glass and in the past (before I added the zebra hermit crab into the tank) they've always gotten back up. So the fact that I just recently added the zebra hermit to my tank and that the dead snails started to appear recently and that most of the dead snails were found near the front glass of the tank and that I found the hermit eating the snail that I just knocked off the glass hours earlier made me conclude that the zebra hermit is my snail killer. I had scarlet and blue legged hermits previously and I never had this problem with snails being killed. So I'm going to take out the zebra hermit now.

[Beverly]

Whoa! Really old thread, Sam

I did a series of videos on catching an Oenone worm. The worm we fianlly caught wasn't what we thought we had. Here's the video of the worm we caught...

http://www.lostmymarblz.com/v-120g-b...-apr-29-06.wmv
April 29, 2006
(320 x 240 pixels, 7.1 MB, 2:18 minutes)

Read Dr. Ron Shimek's Reefkeeping Magazine's article, "The Large Worm Turns"...
http://www.reefkeeping.com/issues/2003-04/rs/index.php

As it turned out, we had a bunch of other snail deaths in August 2006. Probably a snail or two a week died for about a month or so, always in the same part of the tank. Was really distressed about the deaths, since we thought we'd caught our snail eater. We did nothing about the deaths, except remove the dead snails. Then, no more snail deaths. Stumped me to no end.

The only two things I can think that may have happened are that our solarensis fairy wrasse wasn't getting his daily scallop any more and he/she may have been killing or eating fallen snails, or that the snails had been in our various tanks over the years, were old and simply died. Or maybe a combination of the two.

Anyway, haven't had a snail death since then.

Hopefully you have IDed the culprit, the zebra hermit, in your snail deaths. We haven't kept hermit crabs since our first tank back in the late 90s.

[draco]

You live in edmonton go to big als aquariums and get a bristol worm trap they say you can catch up to 12" worms