Highest Nitrate (and Phosphate) Levels for Snails and Hermits

[Matt L.]

Why do I ask? Because I want to create those levels in my tank

Seriously, I have had a problem with snail mortality in my 20gal tank I used to quarentine them. There just isn't enough algae and glass area to keep them alive for 4-6 weeks. Feeding the day's Nori remnants from the other tank didn't seem to help either.

Therefore, I'm going to dose the tank with sodium nitrate and potassium phosphate, but I wanted to see if anyone had any ideas first.

I also thought about leaving some food in there to rot, but felt I would be haphazardly creating a potentially lethal situation that could kill.

Matt

 

[smcnally]

Is there a reason you QT cleaning crews for so long? It seems a bit excessive to me. If you're worried about hitchers, you should be able to just brush off their shell or something. I've never known of anyone that QTs snails and hermits before.

 

[S Hunter]

Hmm, thats a new one on me... i have always just tossed them in

 

[Matt L.]

Is there a reason you QT cleaning crews for so long? It seems a bit excessive to me. If you're worried about hitchers, you should be able to just brush off their shell or something. I've never known of anyone that QTs snails and hermits before.

No, I agree that it is a bit excessive.

I just practice strict quarentine, in which all incoming life is quarentined either by hyposalinity if it is a fish or by isolation in a fish-free environment if it is invertebrate or live rock/sand.

I went through all this trouble to eradicate parasites from my system in the past 18 months, and I would hate to reintroduce them after all that effort.

In theory, an Ich parasite, for example, could be (but wouldn't necessarily likely be) present in any drop of water from a non-quarentined system.

Matt

 

[randoma]

If you dose with live phytoplankton (available for around $15 at your favorite LFS) you'll have plenty of algae growing on the glass in a couple days. About 5-10ml every couple days should give you more algae than you want. Ask me how I know!

For hermits, you could just drop a few mysis or brine shrimp every once in a while. Same for most shrimp. Starfish will probably want something a bit larger.

We used to have a coral banded shrimp, 20-30 snails, ~6 hermit crabs, 3 peppermint shrimp and a serpent star in our 18 gallon fishless tank. The inverts were clearly hungry until we started feeding as above.

The serpent starfish, in particular, made it very clear that it was not getting enough to eat. I dropped a couple mysis in the tank and it tried to crawl right out of the tank to get to them. After that it got a small piece of silversides every couples days.