Can turbos starve?

AzCondor

New member
My clean up crew in my 40 breeder consists of a sally lightfoot, 5 astrea, 5 nassarius. I recently added 4 giant turbos (they are like 3 inches), my question is will they starve after they eat up the algae that is in there. I had a bad hair algae problem but I put a sea hare in there and it ate it all and then I removed it and added these turbos so it doesn't get out of hand again. Does anyone supplement feeding with sheets of algae?
Thanks,
Connor
 
Anything can starve to death. I started out with about a dozen snails in my 20 gallon at first, now I'm down to four. A nerite, a turbo, a cerith and a trochus. There's just nothing for them to eat, which is a good thing really.
 
Honestly, in my experience most "cleanup crew" animals are overrated. Hermit crabs just climb all over corals and kill snails for their shells; many crabs (especially Sally Lightfoots) become aggressive opportunistic predators as they get bigger; and most stores suggest overstocking with snails, which leads to their starvation.

That said, I think some snails are helpful when they are lightly stocked (so the poor things don't starve to death). I found that when I ignored the however-many-per-10-gallons "rule" that I was given by stores, and just added a couple of animals, they suddenly quit dying mysteriously (also, I don't have any wretched hermit crabs to attack them), because they didn't have so much competition for food. You have a ton of algae-eaters in that tank. If it were my tank, I would get rid of all of them except for either the astrea snails or one turbo, and then supplement their diet with nori. If you have a lot of problems with algae, try to address the source (possibly too many nutrients in the water due to overcrowding, overfeeding, and/or an inefficient skimmer), which ultimately is more efficient than trying to control it with algae-eaters. Good luck!
 
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