Turbo Snail bizarre behavior

[kreblak]

Recently, my turbo snails have been laying on their backs (upside down) with their trap doors shut. They right themselves eventually, and then do it again. One snail has stayed in the same place for three days! He rights himself, slides up the glass, and then I look an hour later and he is upside down in the same place:confused:

I am baffled by this behavior. The only change to the tank recently has been the addition of a 2" long candy stripe cleaner shrimp. Is the shrimp messing with the snails? Are they suffering from some sort of disease? To be honest, they are acting like they got into the liquor cabinet...staggering and falling down drunk. What is going on here?

[ChilDawg]

How long have you had them? I found an interesting discussion on Turbos at this website: http://www.reefs.org/library/article/snail_acclimatization.html

I'll look for more as the day goes on, but I figured that this would be a good start and I HTH,

Matthew

[ChilDawg]

There's a little bit on this page...they might need some supplemental feeding: http://www.wetwebmedia.com/swsnailfaq3.htm

[ChilDawg]

And, yet, a little more...they just sometimes get flipped, but it looks like you need to flip them back over...they expend less energy that way! http://www.aquarticles.com/articles/saltwater/ziegler04.html

[kreblak]

The snails have been in the tank for 6 months, and have only started doing this in the last 3 days. I have diatoms, in fact, I have a lot of them. Plus, my hermits are molting, so I don't think it's the calcuim levels.

[mogurnda]

I had a similar problem. They're never very good at righting themselves, but it seemed like they fell over more. Then they died one by one. The tank was fish only, with a few shrimp and hermits, back then, and there wasn't much variety of algae, mostly cynano. My theory was that they were slowly starving, because I have never lost a snail since changing over to a reef, which generates a large variety of algae for their grazing pleasure.
Do you have a lot of green stuff for them to graze on?

[kreblak]

Plenty of green stuff for them, but they won't touch it. They love the diatoms/brown algae, but won't go near the green hair algae in the tank. I am left to cleaning that by hand.

[mogurnda]

Well then, my hypothesis is wrong.
Are they still active, when they're not on their backs?
Has the tank temp gone up lately?


grasping at straws...

[ChilDawg]

From some of those links, it looks like they don't eat any algae besides diatoms.

[kreblak]

Yeah, I read those links, and they all seemed to say that turbos will only eat brown algae. The tank temperature is 78 every time I see it. Also, the snails seem somewhat avtive save for the back time. There is one in particular that will wall crawl for about an hour, then fall on his back and shut the trap door. I have never actually seen him drop, but I will see him up on the glass, and five minutes later he is on the bottom upside down.

??????????

[mogurnda]

Not so sure here. They don't like hair algae, but in my tank they have grazed on some turfs. Of course, they may have been scraping diatoms off of the turf.
I am out of ideas.

And you don't see anyone bugging them? What else is in there?

[kreblak]

They've been fine with the existing fish for 6 months now. The only change in livestock has been the addition of the cleaner shrimp. I have yet to see anyone bugging the snails, although I suspect maybe the scarlet hermit crabs have been getting nosey.