Vermetid Snail ELIMINATION - In tank Treatments

Isayso said:
The white babies that you see are the colonists snails they are about 1/4 " or smaller and they are good snails , the vermetid don't crawls,
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I see, Im seeing 2 species now, one is round with what looks like 2 spirals on the shell & the other looks conical to a point like a Cerith snail with both white & tiny. Im going to start removing all i can catch after lights out hopefully that will help stall them. I have no algae in my tank so snails of any kind not really needed except Certihs. Tried to catch a few..... pretty easy with a feeder bulbs suction so im on a mission till a better solution comes our way.
 
This thread is right on time. I didn't read the whole thing and don't feel the need too.

BLUE SPOT PUFFER (Canthigaster solandri)

I have battled the vermetids for years. Super glue the hole shut, fill hole with kalkwasser, cut them off with pruners, jab a stainless rod filed to a point through them. For every big one I killed there was a handful of small ones waiting to grow big enough to get killed. Feed the tank, stir up the sand , blow off the rocks and they showed up everywhere. Bumble bee snails, copperband, longnose bff, hermits, emeralds, sally light foot, nothing ate them. Hell I gave rock an acid bath, soaked it in bleach and the vermetids were still alive, relentless.
I have a 150g SPS dominate tank that was left neglected and overgrown for quite a while. I broke down a bio cube and through in a Valentini and a Blue Spot puffer. Sure they nip at sps and eat zoas but who cared. There was enough SPS where they could graze for days and no zoanthids in the tank. They definitely pick at sps, eat the edges off monti, bite the corallites off acro. The good thing was they would pick at one coral then move on to another while the other healed up. Like they knew if they ate the whole thing they would cut off there food supply, but could they be that smart?
The last two weeks I have been cleaning the tank, donated most of the coral to a research facility and noticed.
HOLY CRAP, Vermitids are gone!!. well not completely but not plague proportions. there's a few here and there. I saw for the first time today, the blue spot puffer latch on to a vermetid snail and bit through the tube. I actually heard it outside the tank. Pretty cool sight. Still yet to see the Valentini eat one , but will be watching closely.
I have been debating the past couple days whether to take the puffers out, since I am redoing everything and don't have much acro for them to nibble on. I will be the guinea pig and keep them in and see what they eat for sure. I would not recommend putting them in your prized reef tank with you speckled kraks or beach bum , but if you don't care if things get nibbled on it could be worth a shot?
I have seen them eat Montipora, Acropora, and Zoanthids.
I have not seen them eat but can't say they won't eat. Euphyllia(torch, hammer, frog), Stylophora, Cyphastrea, Leptastrea, Leptoseris, Pavona, Chalice, Psammocora., Duncan or Candy Canes or Bubble tip nems, Aiptasia

I will post pics of nibbled on sps frags that are in the tank now and document. Hopefully they survive, if not I and I don;t see another vermetid an LPS tank is fine
 
just spend about 2+ hours reading this whole thread....
SO to sum this up, no chemical is reef safe as of yet?! and truthfully no fish or crab/shrimp/snail is known to eat them, and for us reefers to produce same results over and over again.
Honestly as much as i use to hate them, i started to like them. at the beginning when they started to spread they use to annoy my corals, specially lps. But now i see their webs touching corals and corals don't seem to mind it anymore.
So the only problem is; that i got thousands of these snails skeletons all over my 500 gallon 8 feet long tank that i just leaned to accept them as part of the creatures God created. Besides they do some good to filter our tanks anyways.
Also one more good thing "possible" - i think they eat ick also! Just think about it. when ick free swimming around the tank. or when they ready to attach to any hard surface, same surface that is covered by v-snails, dont you guys think they will be caught by v-snails webs? I say it because i know i had ick in my tank. and i have two fish that is most known to have ick. Achilles tang and hippo blue tang. and i know they use to have ick on them, and now i dont see case of ich in my tank for over a year now. And i just sold my powder blue and powder brown tangs just because they All started to be very aggressive towards each other. im saying this because with all that aggression and stress in fish i still didn't see any ick, could it be thanks to these ugly looking vermetid snails? im inclined to think so!
 
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Lacy said:
Has anyone tried emerald crabs?
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My emerald crabs never showed interest in them. Also, for some reason emerald crabs never last long in my tanks.

Parrot fish, triggers, puffers, and the like will likely eat vermetids with delight but quite likely everything else aside from fish as well...

Sent from my XT1254 using Tapatalk
 
ThRoewer said:
My emerald crabs never showed interest in them. Also, for some reason emerald crabs never last long in my tanks.

Parrot fish, triggers, puffers, and the like will likely eat vermetids with delight but quite likely everything else aside from fish as well...

Sent from my XT1254 using Tapatalk
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I've been looking at a clown trigger... but in a 225SPS tank, a clown trigger is kinda like herpes, once you get it you have it for life.
 
zheka757 said:
just spend about 2+ hours reading this whole thread....
SO to sum this up, no chemical is reef safe as of yet?! and truthfully no fish or crab/shrimp/snail is known to eat them, and for us reefers to produce same results over and over again.
Honestly as much as i use to hate them, i started to like them. at the beginning when they started to spread they use to annoy my corals, specially lps. But now i see their webs touching corals and corals don't seem to mind it anymore.
So the only problem is; that i got thousands of these snails skeletons all over my 500 gallon 8 feet long tank that i just leaned to accept them as part of the creatures God created. Besides they do some good to filter our tanks anyways.
Also one more good thing "possible" - i think they eat ick also! Just think about it. when ick free swimming around the tank. or when they ready to attach to any hard surface, same surface that is covered by v-snails, dont you guys think they will be caught by v-snails webs? I say it because i know i had ick in my tank. and i have two fish that is most known to have ick. Achilles tang and hippo blue tang. and i know they use to have ick on them, and now i dont see case of ich in my tank for over a year now. And i just sold my powder blue and powder brown tangs just because they All started to be very aggressive towards each other. im saying this because with all that aggression and stress in fish i still didn't see any ick, could it be thanks to these ugly looking vermetid snails? im inclined to think so!
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Well No! They are a plague
Even if they are God's creatures,
Like malaria, measles , chickenpox,and so on.
I did cook my rocks nothing is alive after that kind of bath, I did post few pictures of the infestation of the snails
 
Now, in a dedicated system these guys could actually do good. I mean, they are reef-building organisms after all. In the Mediterranean these snails, feather duster worms, and coralline algae are the primary organisms to build reefs and create life rock. Given how fast they can grow even under suboptimal conditions could make them a prime choice to create tank grown life rock with great porosity, natural shape, and a very low dry weight.
Of course you would have to sterilize the so created rocks and then revive them with actually desirable organisms in a vermetid free system.

Sent from my XT1254 using Tapatalk
 
When I put my rocks in an acid bath it killed them all. Used my rock for 4-5 months while my tank was being built. They can come in on frags, corals, rock, heck it seems as if they can just magically appear!:lol:

Corey
 
Two weeks ago I noticed several of the large kind on a freshly imported maricultured tennis-ball-sized Acropora colony. There were at least 2 huge ones on the front of the base, possibly more on the whole base. I think this is among the primary ways they come into the hobby (never had actually got them with live rock in the past).
If the stores do not kill them right away the snails will spawn and that way they infest the store's coral system and then the frag plugs... I've seen babies and juveniles on frags.
Unfortunately, if the larva had settled just recently and its tube isn't large enough to be spotted, they can easily slip by even if you check for them. That's one of the reasons why I generally prefer to have fresh-cut frags without plug or remove the frag if possible.
 
dadummy said:
This thread is right on time. I didn't read the whole thing and don't feel the need too.

BLUE SPOT PUFFER (Canthigaster solandri)

...
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That fish may not be the ideal way of fighting them in a tank with corals, but it is certainly a way to clear rocks of these pests in a separate tank. Plus I like puffers.
 
I'll reiterate that bumble bee snails ARE effective but seemingly only against the small variety of vermetid. The large ones... I chop them down with fragging tools. Fish will eat them once you chop them off the rocks (wrasses, tangs, TRIGGERS, PUFFERS!).

Side note, I was going to move a rock in my lagoon and cut sliced by a large vermetid I didn't see behind the rock. Just like a scalpel. I've got a half-moon shaped incision on the end of my ring finger now. The vermetid will be trigger food this afternoon. :0)
 
I had a pretty healthy population of them until I emergency-housed a purple tang for a few weeks. Rascal ate them all. I can't say that's a tang thing, and that fish had some dietary issues: I was dosing his food; but he did seem to thrive on the tank's wildlife.
 
McPuff said:
I'll reiterate that bumble bee snails ARE effective but seemingly only against the small variety of vermetid. The large ones... I chop them down with fragging tools. Fish will eat them once you chop them off the rocks (wrasses, tangs, TRIGGERS, PUFFERS!).
...
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If Bumblebee snails eat the small ones they likely also go after the babies of the large which is already great news.
I'm currently working on sourcing the snails that eat the large vermetids. They should actually be not too hard to find in the tropical regions of the Indian and Pacific oceans...

Sk8r said:
I had a pretty healthy population of them until I emergency-housed a purple tang for a few weeks. Rascal ate them all. I can't say that's a tang thing, and that fish had some dietary issues: I was dosing his food; but he did seem to thrive on the tank's wildlife.
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How did the tang bite through the hard tubes these pests build? Did he break those tubes down or did he wait until they stuck their heads out?
 
Sk8r said:
I had a pretty healthy population of them until I emergency-housed a purple tang for a few weeks. Rascal ate them all. I can't say that's a tang thing, and that fish had some dietary issues: I was dosing his food; but he did seem to thrive on the tank's wildlife.
Click to expand...

Sk8r, not doubting your experience with the Purple Tang, but I have one in my 120, been there almost 2 years, and he's never touched any that I have.
Big or small. He pays no nevermind to them even when their feeding threads are extended.
 
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