Snails in reef tank

  • We are currently upgrading MFK. thanks! -neo
B

barna

Feeder Fish
Jun 9, 2008
3
0
0
canada
hi all,
so our once beautiful 90 reef tank has slowly been declining in health over the past few months. green hairy ealgy has taken over most of the live rock... so i went down to aquarium services and bought 20 snails, 10 hermit crabs, and an emperor urchent.... they seem to be slowly cleaning up the tank but some of the snails appear to be dieing....

they are shrivling up on their sides. could this be because they are simply too full, or are they infact dying?
 
Check your salinity.
next time you add water check the salinity in the tank and adjust as needed.
this happened to me, i had a bad cyano outbreak after awhile and everything started dieing.
 
Salinity is not so much a problem. What he needs to do is find out why the tank is declining. Think about it. The only thing that can show to be problematic with algae is phosphates and nitrates.
When was the last time the water was tested?
What were the results?
You need to provide data before one can truly say that it is either this or that.
 
skene;2620441; said:
Salinity is not so much a problem. What he needs to do is find out why the tank is declining. Think about it. The only thing that can show to be problematic with algae is phosphates and nitrates.
When was the last time the water was tested?
What were the results?
You need to provide data before one can truly say that it is either this or that.
Click to expand...

Pretty much the same thing happened to me. all i did to fix it was add freshwater to dilute the over-salty water, and added a phosphate remover and a few mithrax crabs, and two huge snails (nano tank, 90 would probably need more)

I'm assuming the die off of small crabs, and probably stuff inside the rock (the salt was HIGH...) caused a spike in nitrates.

It was clean (spotless) in about a week and a half
 
Possible. But salinity is not usually a killer of snails. Unless you are talking about your garden variety snails and slugs. Nitrates and copper and ammonia are killer to snails.
Now keep in mind that if you have salinity of over 1.030 then sure you've got more to worry about than dying snails.
But he is referencing an algae bloom. There are too many variables with that.
Main cause is tank neglect.
 
i would check ALL aspects of the water copper,salt,nitrate,ect ,,,then once you find the cause of the deaths you can combat the green hair by turning the lights off for 3 full days(this will not harm corals in fact its good for them once a year). the salt level will make a huge impact on livestock,,hydrometers are USELESS when it comes to inverts. you will need to have your salt checked with a device called a refractometer. good luck.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
MonsterFishKeepers.com
Top Bottom