Peppermint shrimps trying to eat conehead snail

[Midnightbreeze]

Is this natural? The snail is on the bottom corner, tucked in for defense, and the shrimp are trying to claw their way in to it. I am just assuming the conehead is alive at this point. I read that these shrimp are just scavengers. Any thoughts?

 

[Midnightbreeze]

Never mind, it looks like the snail did in fact croak. The shrimp is just scavenging it, or trying to.

 

[J. Montgomery]

My peppermint shrimp is rather large and has pretty much wiped out my once thriving population of stomatella snails.

 

[Midnightbreeze]

Nice pic, but kinda hard to tell how big it is.

I wonder if 4 peppermints are too much for my 12 gallon? It seems so. Maybe my LFS will adopt some back. Nothing else in there now but a yellowtail damsel and live rock. I am waiting until the brown algae clears before I get a clownfish. This stuff sprang up right away, so its probably diatoms. I am slowly converting to R/O water from the nasty Phoenix tap water (while using ph buffer for the R/O)

 

[Midnightbreeze]

P.S. ....and a filter the store recommended called chemi-pure elite, which supposedly removes silicate and phosphates. But this is the wrong section for that talk