Vermetid Snails

[lowtek]

Any ideas on battling vermetid snails? Minimize feeding?, crabs or bumblebee snails that might eat your good snails? I was away from home for 5 months no water change minimum feeding and no chemistry adjustments. Only an occasional top off. When I finally was able to move back in, and tend to my tank, I noticed an invasion of vermetids. Thought they were just more fan worms that apparently disappeared. Now I'm stuck with a flood of them. Not freaked out yet because I dont have that many corals but still enough to not want to tear down whole tank. Any ideas? Thanks

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[kfisc]

Minimizing feeding helps, as does watching water quality, so with luck, they may die off. The other side is that the infestation was likely going to happen anyway, and you've just "time-traveled" to where it was going.

Some people try to break them off, kind of like my wife went out and tried digging up grubs out of the front yard one summer. It actually kind of worked.

 

[Sk8r]

I just ignore them. They generally stay to the sand, just one more detritus eater. The corals above them don't care, and generally outcompete them.

 

[Oldreeferman]

They cannot be starved out, to do that everything in the tank would also have to starve, they can live on polished water, i change my filter daily & have min the feeding to where i can now see my fishes ribs LOL and still the dreaded vermetids exist & thrive.
As SK8r said ignoring them as part of an ecosystem is solid advice. Only time ive actually found them an issue is IF one happens to be invasive in a corals growth path, and in that case i very carefully dive in & remove that particular snail away. Ok, maybe dive in is pushing it a lil LOL but have to be very careful around mother colonys of hard corals they break with just a hard look so have to do it like its brain surgery sometimes as they can be hard to reach under corals.

 

[zheka757]

when my tank was about a year old with very little amount of corals in it. i had about 3-7 snails per square inch of all my rock work. 3.5 years later i still have them and i have sps, lps, and zoanthis in my tank, all growing happy. i will say that i don't see as much vermetid snails that are active, about 70% of what i see are just dead tubes, no snails. i have 6 line wrass, coperband butterfly, fire shrimp, cleaner shrimp in my tank, and many more fishes, but listed above might be nibbling on them.

lol, as soon as i saw your title, i was like ...yeah good luck with that...