Acro eating snail ID?

[chineseknife]

I found this guy munching away on a coral that has plenty of tissue and polyps as of last night. The base of this acro had been "burnt" away from some red mushrooms around it, but the rest was doing very well.
Could this snail be the culprit? Has anyone seen this snail before? Maybe a Coralliphoria?
I used big pics for better detail in identifying it. Sorry.

 

[chineseknife]

^

 

[chineseknife]

One more time ^

 

[pagojoe]

It appears to be an ergalataxine murex, either Ergalatax (sometimes genus Cronia) margariticola or a closely-related species. There is a photo of the living animal on page 380 of Okutani's "Marine Mollusks in Japan," and it looks to be identical to yours.

http://www.gastropods.com/1/Shell_1131.html

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=margariticola&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi

Some similar species feed on corals, but these species are primarily white with a few being white with traces of other colors. E. margariiticola usually feeds on other molluscs or barnacles.

http://www.museum.wa.gov.au/dampier/documents/pdf/tankohsiang.pdf

Cheers,



Don

 

[chineseknife]

Thanks for the reply, and the links.
Also, I lived in La Porte for 19 years and went to SHSU for a bit.
So, Howdy! to a fellow Texan.

 

[STREAMLINEGFX]

I actually found one of these in my tank one evening after the lights had went off. He was sitting on one of my acro colonies. I thought it might be a fluke so I moved him off. A few nights later I found him again on another one of my acros and when I pulled him off there looked to be a dead spot where he had been. After that I threw him in the fuge. I tried to search, but found no info on it.

 

[pagojoe]

Like I said, there are some similar snails that eat corals, but I've personally never collected this species off of live coral, and the species wasn't found eating coral in the paper I referenced above, which was done specifically to determine what the shallow-water muricids were eating. I did find one reference that mentioned, in passing, "Cronia margariticola" along with Drupella cornus as being corallivorous. Whether Streamline's snails were the same species is hard to say, since even the experts have trouble agreeing on which snails in the Ergalataxinae are subspecies or variations of other species, or totally different species. Combine that with the fact that many of these species keep being reassigned to different genera, with each genus having different general feeding habits, and you can quickly see how inexact a passing ID on a similar snail might be. If you'd like to take pics of your snail, STREAMLINEGFX, I'll be glad to give you an opinion on its ID. Pics showing the aperture help a lot.

Cheers,



Don

 

[chineseknife]

Thanks Don. I'll see if I can't scrounge him out of the sump and take a pic of said aperture.

 

[STREAMLINEGFX]

Thanks Don, let me see if I can dig him out and snap a pic.