Cleanup Crew!

Still catching up...

Two weeks ago I ordered five ORA captive-bred cerith snails from Algae Barn in Boulder, Colorado.  This was a major breakthrough for me because I had not been able to find captive-bred invertebrates anywhere locally or on the internet.  Cerith snails are nocturnal and live primarily in the sand bed, eating detritus and keeping the sand bed stirred up at night.  In addition to cerith snails, Algae Barn also stocks ORA captive-bred trochus snails (rock and glass cleaners), and I've seen captive-bred peppermint shrimp (general detritus eaters) as well, so it looks like there's an opportunity to build a captive-bred cleanup crew after all.

Temperature acclimating

I ordered my snails on a Sunday afternoon via 2-3 USPS shipping at Algae Barn's recommendation.  They snails did not arrive until Thursday afternoon and there were no signs of life.  I acclimated them, introduced them to my tank and waited.  After some back-and-forth with Algae Barn, at the three day mark of no movement they told me to remove them from the tank and put a new set in the mail the next day, I didn't even have to ask.

Clearly I'm not the first to have this happen.  :(

The second set arrived clearly alive and moving around in the bag.  I floated the bag for 15 minutes and then drip acclimated them for 30 minutes.  I dropped them in the tank and they had buried themselves in the sand within 5 minutes.  Mission accomplished!  Over the last few nights they have already made a dent in the diatoms on my sand bed.  Hopefully they'll eat the uneaten food on the bottom as well, since there always seems some pellets that make their way to the bottom of the tank.

The second set of snails just before they
buried themselves and disappeared

Although ORA supplies their captive-bred invertebrates to a number of retailers and shops across the country, I couldn't recommend Algae Barn more highly if you're looking for mail order goods.  Even though I haven't tried them yet, I am also really keen to add some copepods and phytoplankton to my system as well to boost biodiversity.  More on that to come...