vermetid snails killing my LPS???

[steallife904]

I noticed 2 days ago a blasto frag I have started not looking as open as it normally does. Last night I could see skeleton around the rim and it shrunk. It only has a few heads and all look like this. Every other coral in the tank look fine, no changes in water, still on my weekly water changes etc... I actually did a water change last night and blew the rocks off right before and I noticed this blasto was covered by the slime web from a vermetid or 2 right next to it. Could this have been going on and stressing him out?

 

[dansreef]

I have the dang vermetid snails in my tank and my sump in the basement. They took off and I really didnt give them much thought. That is until one day I was doing something in the sump, moving some equipment around and stirring up gunk ... that I noticed the amount of vermetids in the sump and tank. When the water gets stirred up they use that time to send out their slimy..."webs" everywhere. There were parts of my tank I didnt think there were some... that was almost a matt of this web stuff...

I have been able to get rid of most in my display over a period of months by introducing bublebee snails. I had a fellow reefer suggest it...and sure enough the amount that these two little bublebee snails have taken care of is pretty impressive. I need to now get some for the sump. The snails are pretty small...and actually for the first couple of months I never saw them. Then I saw them one morning and watched for them at night. They were hard at work.

To answer your question, the vermetid snails will irratate other corals with their web-like feeding...particularly if they multiply unchecked. Is it bothering your blasto... it may very well be.

 

[shollis2814]

My battle with vermetid snails was chemical and physical.
They tend to multiply according to food supply. So, overfeeding/higher nitrates can lead to an increase. I started upping my water changes.

On rocks that could easily and safely be removed from the tank for a few minutes, I took a pair of needle nose pliers to the base of their tube. Just snapping off the tube doesn't kill them as they can withdraw down into the base. Crushing the base of all I could reach on the rock also encouraged one emerald crab to start feeding on others in the tank (YMMV with this). It was almost like he said, "Oh, there's yummy stuff in these tubes, let's get cracking!".

It's a long battle. keeping extra nutrients in the tank for a minimum amount of time and physically removing what you can helped me.