mexican turbo snail

StrategicReef

StrategicReef

New member
I had an algae outbreak due to skimmer malfunction for 2 weeks.

What I want to get rid of is the purple/red hair algae. None of my other snails would touch it.. (cerith, magarita, astera, trohcus)

But I have a 24 gallon tank with smaller rocks so I am afraid it might knock out rocks and corals.

My question is if I can find the smallest mexican turbo snail instead of like a 2" one, would it consume the hair algae same as a big one?

Thanks
 
I know of no snail that will touch hair algae of any sort, I know of one that will eat red slime algae to an extent, but none that will touch hair algae.....where did you hear that a turbo would?
 
Turbos do eat HA. Mexicans seem to prefer green and turbos of pacific origin seem to prefer red. I'll have to find it but there is a good article linked in an old thread.
 
Hi yeah send it.....honestly I havent had too many turbo snails in my life, they tend to ruin my coral placement...LOL I havent observed them eating it, although I cant say hair algae has been a bane in what tanks I have had my turbos in before...
 
I had a HA breakout in my 90g tank. I slowly shortened the hours of light and cut coral feeding down to once every 3 or 4 weeks. I continued this for about 3 months. Idea was to starve it out but it didn’t work. I have Cerith, Astrea, Nassaurius, Nerite snails and 3 emerald crabs. Nothing touched it. I had read several articles about Mexican Turbos and decided I would try some.
About a month and a half ago I was traveling for work and happen to run into a store that was selling them for 2 bucks ea which was a good deal. I snagged 10 of the smallest ones I could get. Most of them were dime to nickel sized. It wasn’t overnight but they did make a huge dent in a week. Today I would say they have cleaned up about 80%. I have not seen them push anything over or do any harm to my tank.

Here are some things you may want to do to help win this battle.
First thing is don’t do anything drastic. It will take time to get rid of it or get it to a manageable point.
Check your water parameters, “phosphates, Nitrates, Nitrite and ammonia”.
If possible cut back feeding â€"œ not knowing what you have in your tank its hard to say how much. My corals are all photosynthetic so I could stop completely.
Manually remove as much HA as you can and as it grows keep removing it.
Get one maybe 2 Mexican Turbos. â€"œ Keep in mind once the HA is gone you may have to supplement feeding these guys. Also keep in mind that they will eat other types of algae so your other snails may suffer from this. Again im no expert and have no idea what your tank is set up like. Just want to make sure all critters are taken care of.
Good luck and you can/will win this battle. Just takes time!
 
I have the same Margarita snail and they don't really touch hair algae. I have green and red/purple HA.

I just got couple midsized turbo snails and I can see a reduction slowly. While they do not carefully clean the area, but I can see some of it gone where they were hanging out most.

The LFS also recommend "borrowing" a small Seahare if the problem persists, however I am scared because they could relese toxic ink if they are threatened or die. Anyone can comment on them?
 
Have you tried a SEAHARE.. they WILL eat almost any algae they can get their mittens on... they've help my turbos get rid of Hair, caulerpa and working on turf right now....
 
To deal with my hair algae, I just manually removed it weekly, skimmed like crazy, and added some scarlet hermit crabs. The crabs do well for shorter HA and the manual removals took care of the longer HA. I also got some margaritas for the glass and they do make a small dent, but it's really slow. I'm planning to get some more snails and hermits because I only bought several of each to see if they were effective.

If you decide to use margaritas to remove HA, you'll want atleast a dozen or two. The only problem with this is that, IME, I have about a 50% mortality with these snails and in a smaller tank, it might actually add fuel to the HA. This is why I bought smaller quantities and I plan to continually add slowly.

It took almost a year, but the improvements are significant, so there is hope. Good luck
 
Margarittas do have a significant mortality rate. Most of it is because they require a cooler temp. 78 deg. Max
They have a hard time uprighting themselves when thay fall off of glass or rock.
I also heard that Lawnmower Bleenies work on HA to.
 
Ok, I added a small crew of medium mexican turbos, grey.. and the orange shelled turbo snails, I don't know their origin.. so far I have good luck with magarita for months now but I probably will not get them again.

The fastest mouth is trochus snails but they don't really eat hair algae.

The turbo snails evidently eat hair algae, both red and green, it is making a difference already and I can see the new poop pallets that they generated.

I searched for seahare, alot of people have them died shortly or disappeared after introducing them, so I think I will not go with that for now.
 
drip aclimate for 2 hours for seahares... I have mine since aug. or sept... and still eating like a champ... plus I also supplement w/ nori here and there..
 
Ok couple of pics of my Mexican Turbos. Sorry bout the crappy pic's.

95137DSC00447.JPG


95137DSC00445.JPG


95137DSC00450.JPG
 
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