Trochus snail mating behavior?

[juniorrocketdad]

Hello again,
So I have my new 34 gallon Red Sea max c130 and about a week and a half ago I put the first cleanup crew in after about 3 weeks of algae accumulation, the first crew consisted of 4 hermits 1 emerald 3 Astraea and 2 what I think are trochus snails,they were doing a pretty good job so decided to send in some reinforcements consisting of 3 Astraea 3 trochus and 3 small hermits. This is where the wierd thing happened.one of the new snails maybe five minutes after it was added, which I'm sure was a trochus lifted up his front half of his body almost vertically and started putting some white fluid into the water, my best guess is that it's a desperate attempt to mate because it thinks it is going to die, I was just wondering what you all think?

 

[kurt_n]

Yup... that's what it was doing. That's definitely the description of how they spawn.

 

[juniorrocketdad]

Ok thanks for confirming my suspicions

 

[kurt_n]

In my tank, I had a trochus position itself on the highest rock spire. It started wiggling around like you describe, and puffing out white "smoke" like crazy. Within a couple minutes, I had *all* my trochus snails (and I had quite a few at the time) on various rock outcroppings doing the same thing. As I looked closer, I could see some were puffing out "smoke" while others were puffing out little tiny eggs. Massive spawning event, but I could never really figure out what triggered it.

Watch your tank in the next 4-6 months and I bet you notice some "extra" little trochus snails appear that you never bought. That's what happened with mine. Strange thing though... it's never happened again. Had the tank 8 years now.