Any ideas on whats happening to my turbo snails?

[sandsrfr]

Are snails extremely sensitive to temp. changes?

 

Reason I ask is because 2 of my 5 turbos are declared dead as of tonight. The other 3 are all very inactive now, and I have quarantined into a hang on container with some fresh salt water (they are still motion-less, but sticking to stuff).

 

My only idea on what has caused this is a temp. rise I had on the tank last weekend. My tank normally runs around 79.0 up to about 81.0 during the day. That weekend, it heated up quite a bit on the west coast, and I started to notice my tank temp. climbing.

 

The highest I think it got was around 83-84. At that point I was trying to fight it with icecubs in ziplock bags. I did notice at the time that all of my hermits and snails were stationary (I was also freaked out the next day to find a hermit w/ no shell stationary on a piece of LR, soon to find out it had molted, or 3 of them did).

 

Since this time, I did notice a few of the snails moving around quite a bit. But in the last few days they have all basically stopped, and 2 were dead (one being eaten by 2 of the hermits and another taken over with 2 of the minitaure pink/purple worms I got in there).

 

My salinity has been pretty stable throughout the whole ordeal (in the 1.022-1.026 range at the extremes).

 

Last night I did some water testing, and here is what I came up with:

nitrite=0,

nitrate=1.5ppm,

alkalinity=2,

ph=8.1,

free ammonia=0,

total ammonia (after 30 mins my sensor started to show somewhere around:)=0.05 to 0.1,

& calcium=~400

 

My tank specs are:

21 gallon Via Aqua with

2x36watt PC (1-10k & 1-actinic) on 12 hour cycle (2hour actinic - 8 hour 10k/actinic - 2hour actinic)

Aqua-C remora skimmer

Aquaglobe 200gph powerhead

25lbs Live Sand (full of critters)

30lbs Live rock (Tonga & Figi)

 

Tank was setup on 12-22-03 (with ls & lr). 4 Red leg hermits and 5 Turbo Snails were added on 1-2-03. I did a 5 gallon water change 2 weeks ago, and my skimmer has been running since setup (pulling out some nasty stuff I might add also).

 

As of today, I haven't added anything else, except for a cleaner wrasse (yeah I know, see if I'll ever listen to the kid at the lfs again) which ended up dying from a major case of ich.

 

I've had about 2 large outbreaks of brown algae on the ls, which happened a few weeks back. I also noticed some long hair algae beginning to grow on my skimmer pre-filter box, which I scrubbed off).

 

Any advice on what might have caused this problem with the snails would be greatly appreciated. I am wanting to start to stalk the tank with some corals/zoos/ricordia and clownfish (slowly of course), but am now concerned that there is something wrong...

 

I'm really bummed about the snails believe it or not. They've all started to develop beautiful purple & pink coraline on their shells, and now I think I'm gonna loose them all...

 

Thanks for any advice,

Sandsrfr

[SoS]

Snails are very sensitve perhaps the most sensitive creature in your tank. If something spikes temp, salinity, ammonia, nitrate...etc. the first thing to go is a few snails.

[sjpresley]

Many of the commonly offered turbos are collected from fairly cool waters off the coast of Florida, these guys do horribly in temps above 80. They either die right off, like yours, or endure a slow decline and wake up dead one day.