How many snails and hermits for clean up?

Rose,

I have a lot of success by add 3 times the amount of snail in the tank. For you, I would add 60 astreas, 60 hermits, No Turbo Snail (they tend to die more often because I think their natural habitate temp is in the 70 degree), and 60 cearith snails (bad spelling). Also check out the link for the snails that shifts the sand for you.

Check out this link,

http://cgi.ebay.com/200-Nassarius-Obsoleta-reef-cleaning-algae-snails_W0QQitemZ7740950416QQcategoryZ66788QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

I recently purchase 200 of them. They are great shifting the sand. When you feed these little critters, it's like the living dead coming out of the sand. :D
 
Typically, one snail per gallon is enough to do the job. Hermits - there is no rule or number. You could get 5 or 10.

Tri's advice isn't wrong, but if your tank is new there won't be much food for the snails to consume. The Ebay deal is tempting, right? You can order it and then share the rest with others in your area.
 
Lol maybe if I had a means of buying from ebay. Thank you Tri for the advice. I went and got some astreas and ceriths. They are really doing a good job. Again thank you.
Rosemarie
 
Rose, if you can hold out for a month or 2, ill be buying quite a large amount of those ebay snails for my 120. You could have some if needed.
 
I would have to agree with Matt. Good advice!!! I started out with 200 and now I am down to 20 or 30.
 
I guess I'll have to be the guy that stands up for Ilyanassa obsoleta snails. I can only speak of my personal experience with these snails. I bought 200 of these guys off eBay around 8 months ago and paid around $20 including shipping. These snails are unmatched in my opinion on their ability to turn the sandbed as they are constantly burrowing in the substrate. Out of the 200 I purchased, I would guess I still have around 150 of them 8 months later. So Tri, if you only have 20 left out of your 200 you recently purchased, then there is something else wrong there. I look at these guys as a cheap live food for the hermits and crabs in my tank. While they're waiting to get eaten or give up their shell to a hermit, they do a fantastic job of sifting the sand. I feel like I've more than gotten my $20 worth of use out of these snails and I've still got most of them still on the job. As long as you have a decent cleanup crew to take care of the ones that succumb, then I give these guys a big thumbs up.
All IMHO.
 
I don't mean to hijack this thread, but I've done a lot of searching on info on these creatures previously and it seems that almost everything I found was pointing back to "Dr. Ron" and his wellknown dislike for these snails. Remove him from the results and add my personal experience and I come up with more positive than negative.
 
Might as well put my experience here as well. I aquired a handful of these left over from a couple of buys (about 30) about at least 6 months ago. I still to date have about 24-25 of them left. I also second that they do a great job of burrowing in the top layer of the sand and keeping everything clean. In fact it is facinating to watch them pull themselve out of the substrate when I feed the tank.
 
With all due respect to this thead's topic...

I might also add another seeming benefit. These snails seem to like to attempt to reproduce in our tanks but are rarely if ever successful. My understanding is the offspring apparently go thru a larval stage where they are essentially planktonic in nature. It is in this stage that other critters in your tank devour them. Sounds like a good thing to me to have a steady source of these tiny creatures being added to your system. And again, at the cheap price for these snails I can't see going wrong. What is the price of snail meat nowadays anyway? :lol:
 
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