MTS-escape artists?

jpappy789

jpappy789

Plants need meat too
Feb 18, 2007
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Gainesville, FL
Real Name
Josh
I recently got some MTS (thanks again Deb!) and was wondering if having a open-topped tank would be an issue. I put them into a separate container to make sure they survived the trip and most of them are now climbing above the water line.

I've never not had a hood or glass top on a tank so I am curious as to whether this is a problem.
 
mine havnt tried to escape. every now and than one will poke above the water but never actually came out of the water. idk about others but i think mine use steroids. i saw one that was a quarter inch pull a full grown mts up the side of the glass.
 
They won't escape. MTS go above the water line to take a big gulp of air each day. They say if you turn your lights back on at night, you'll catch them doing that and then they go back down. I'm asleep when they do it and that's fine with me! LOL!
 
They won't try and escape- in fact I almost never see them go to the surface.

The nocturnal thing is a bit of a myth- they just don't like strong lighting. With staggered lighting they much prefer dawn and dusk to full-blown night. Their cousins, QMs, are slightly more light tolerant I've noticed than the MTS.

Also, if kept in the absence of fish- they will stay out and about all day long. However, I can't imagine anyone intentionally keeps a MTS species tank so they're usually with fish...
 
what are QMs?
 
qm is quilted melania (sp??) a type of mts.

I have never found an MTS out of the tank and most of my tanks are open top.
 
Mine crawl out all the time. I find all kinds of empty shells behind my aquarium, on the floor around it and on the aquarium stand.

Granted, given the total population, there are very few that actually do crawl out, but it happens.
 
Bit of a tangent:

I keep an "outdoor swamp" - it was a pot not properly drained- and would keep flooding. So I made it a swamp- planted plants I found in the wild around lakes edges there.

I usually dump my used tank water into the pot to help the plants... I recently discovered that I have a population of QMs living in the swamp on my deck now. Presumedly one or more escaped with the tank water... Easy to see how "escape to wild" could happen unintentionally... thankfully this is just my deck.

I'll be interested to see if they survive the winter outside in the swamp.
 
Generally a lot of MTS up at the water line means something has gone wrong with water quality. They can be a good warning system.
 
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