Found: Snail on my tabling acro

[chrisstie]

Any ideas for an ID? It's about 2-3mm long, I have it in the picture below next to a Saca.. um. The coin dollar with the native american woman whose name I can't spell for a size reference .

Unsure if good or bad, I assumed bad and put him in my little pico where there's nothing he can harm.

 

[pagojoe]

Hey Chrisstie,

Your snail is a juvenile muricid. It's very hard to give you a definite species level ID because the adults often look quite different from the juveniles, while the juveniles of several genera may look essentially the same. Yours is most likely either a Cronia species or a Drupella species. If I remember correctly, both should have a light colored animal with a greenish tint, and it appears that yours fits that description. I believe your snail's operculum looks more like a Drupella, thin, dark brown, but appearing reddish brown around the more transparent edges. If it's a Cronia species, it will be a carnivore, but it might be a scavenger rather than a killer, according to some sources. If it grows up to be a Drupella, it might not be a nice guy. Some species in this genus are known to feed on hard corals, including the super-common and super-variable Drupella cornus. Yours may be a juvenile of that species.

These are my two best guesses for genera, but there are several other muricid genera that the snail could belong to, with widely varying diets. It will be interesting to see if you can keep it to adulthood.

Cheers,




Don

 

[chrisstie]

Thanks so much Don. With the uncertainty of a juvenile (wonder how long he's been growing in my tank and if there are more, hopefully he just came in as an egg on something) I'm glad I yanked him when I could. He's now in a tank with soft corals and if he's a scavenger he'll do fine in there. He's so small and the corals I have in the pico aren't that great its our little misfit tank so he'll fit right in.