baby astria snails EVERYWHERE.....got a question...

Ok....I took a look at my nano tonight and I've got around 125 baby astria snails crawling on my glass in my minibow. They are all a little smaller than the diamter of a pencil. There is plenty of algae for them to eat but I'd really like to move some over to my 150 system.

I've never had any snails breed in any of my tanks before so I was just a little curious if I should take any extra precautions when moving some over to my bigger tank beyond normal acclimation methods.

Probably sounds like a dumb ? but I just wanna make sure....snail breeding is new territory for me. Kinda freaky to see 125 or so baby snails all over the glass in my nano:P

Cameron

Are they astrea snails? I have hundreds of little snails about the size you said yours were but their shells are shaped like garden snail shells, not astrea. They have been in there for months and have not gotten any bigger. As far as acclimation, I don't see any reason for extraordinary measures to be taken.

They probably aren't astrea -- the long planktonic stage of these guys makes it unlikely you'd have a boatload of 'em running around. I forget the name of 'em, but another reefer in town gave me some of his hitchhiking, horny snails. Full-grown, they're about 2 or 3 mm across with trocchus-like stripes on the shell. They can breed like rabbits in aquariums.

HTH

hmmmm.....I'll take a closer look tonight. The few I looked at were triangular in shape which made me think. I knew about the planktonic stage so it kinda threw me....I'll take another closer look at them tonight.

Cameron

Cameron, the ones bgoode described sound like macarene snails. http://www.reefs.org/hhfaq/pages/main_page...s/faq_rock2.htm

last snail on the page. They do breed quickly. If yours are triangular in shape then they aren't macarene's.

Thanks, Caja -- those are the ones I have.

Thanks for the link caja

Cameron

you're welcome!

Those are the ones I have. Thanks for the link. I hadn't found anything on them.