just as of recent, all of my astrea snails are dying and i have no idea why. My magnesium was a bit low so i raised it to a proper level and i did that over a few days as to not shock them, but after a few days they slowly stopped moving and fell of the glass and just layed on the sandbed. Eventually my craps would flip and eat them. So thinking maybe my mag was too high i tested it and it was not (was at 1350) so i performed two water changes a few days apart. Now because i had no snails to eat algae off of my rocks, i bought some more astrea snails and by the next morning, all of them were lying on the sandbed getting eaten. What the heck is going on here? Algae is stating to grow on my LR and i need some invert to eat them. The weird thing though is that all my other types of snails (nassarius and fighting conch) are perfectly fine. Also, i just tested my water today and everything is absolutely perfect.... SG 1.024; ammonia,nitrite and nitrates - 0 , mag - 1350 calcium - 400, Dkh - 8-9. Please help me figure this out because i've never had this happen to me before. Thanks so much.
What's wrong with my snails????? help!
- Thread starter hapka16
- Start date
Test for copper. Just a random thought but i would look in places you wouldnt normally look. Maybe you had an accidental dosing and maybe astreas are more sensitive to copper than the other snails and inverts. Even if its not copper it wouldnt hurt to test for it as a precautionary measure.
tongabranch
New member
stray current??? some snails may be more susceptible than others. hows your ground probe?
The same thing happened to my Trochus snails following a strange tank crash i had one weekend while i was on vacation...I came home to my tank full of precipitate, cloudy as all hell. My corals (zoas, shrooms, various lps) had all closed up. Fish were all fine. Only thing other than the corals that seemed to be effected were the snails. They did the same thing...moved very very slow, then eventually one by one fell to the sand and lay there. You could touch them and they would retract into their shell a little, but would not move otherwise. They would lay there for days until eventually they would die. My water params seemed on point, so i could not figure out what caused the precipitate to happen or the snails to die (there were 18 of them). I figured there must have been some sort of spike or drop in pH to cause it, but who knows, maybe stray current could have caused it as well? Chemistry was never my strong point.
Cptn Spaulding
New member
astreas do like to just die sometimes. i would try a different type of snail. maybe small turbos or margarita or cerith snails?
