New rescues

Just for kicks, I looked it up online to see what they'd do for a human with copper poisoning, and it mentioned activated charcoal to get as much out of their system as possible. If you don't use activated charcoal in your filtration, or if it's old, you might consider changing it just to ensure there's not ANY more copper in their current water.

Another thing I read is that copper poisoning (in humans) impairs calcium absorption. Since calcium is so important to our snails, I'd recommend very aggressive calcium supplementation, using snail jello, calcium 'licks' in the tank, etc.

Again, I don't know if any of this will help, all I can do is read the biochemistry stuff about humans and make educated guesses. There's a bunch of other stuff in there that I didn't understand - if any of you are nurses or doctors, maybe you can figure out other options? (I don't think Dialyses is much of an option... ;-) )
 
Been super busy and slacking on the updates. We got permission to have the snails all in one tank but it has to be part of the main wall system, so we've disconnected a single segment from the big system and hooked a canister filter through the holes in the wall left by the main plumbing so it's effectively a separate unit now, just a matter of getting the canister cycled (we've already squeezed filter gunk into it) so the snail deaths should end shortly :D.

As for my rescues, Blue and Gold are doing awesome and have been cruising all over the place. Here's a pic of Blue and Ivory (a previous rescue) hanging out, and another of all four I took last night...Blue and Gold were digging themselves into a hole and Ivory was checking the operation out. The purple isn't doing so hot, it's still in it's original position, but it's gone from being open and closing when touched to just being tightly shut all the time. I just moved it more directly under the filter flow, hoping the extra oxygen and water flow will help flush it of any remaining copper and stimulate some movement, but I can't think of anything else to do (besides waiting). It's tightly closed, and there's nothing gunky seeping around the door, so I'm assuming it's still alive for the moment. So that's what's up with my snails.

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True dat, I never thought of it that way...occasionally new fish come in with it (I've seen it 3-4 times since October, seems to always be the glass fish and the silver dollars, and last week all of our large feeder comets had it) but it doesn't seem to spread despite the tropicals all sharing one system and the cold water species sharing the other, and it's usually gone within a week or so. We only treat with sodium thiosulfate as a dechlorinator (medications stay in the quarantine tanks in back), so the copper would make sense as being the inhibiting agent. From what I understand, the copper piping/invert issue is fairly isolated, our store is one of a few older ones that still has the older aquatics system in place and most of the other stores have upgraded or are new enough builds that everything is PVC now.
 
Yeah, can't fault the copper in some respects, but it's good you figured out it was killing your inverts. I'm glad to hear most of the snails are doing well, and with luck your purple will pull through. Nice rescues!
 
The purple guy didn't make it. He spent a day floating, and then yesterday I pulled him because he was all open and limp and unresponsive. I guess two out of three isn't bad.
 
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