Flamingo tongue snail

Does anyone have any insight on this particular snail. I will be putting it in my reef tank tomorrow with a gorgonia. I have read that it eats corals, is this true, if so will it cause havoc in my tank? This snail looks pretty cool and from what I hear they are somewhat rare. Let me know what you think...:-/

 

Beautiful creature but it definitely eats corals

 

Actually, if you wanted to keep it alive, you're providing it with it's favorite food. One of their nicknames is sea fan snail or sea rod snail. Gorgonia are sea fans and sea rods.

 

Im not sure I but I seem to recall having read that Gorgonians are a preffered diet of flamingo tongued snails

I would not risk anything in my reef tank that I was not 100% confident in

Steve

 

It's an obligate feeder on sea whips/gorgonians, won't bother the other stuff in your tank. However, it will eat and kill your gorgonian fairly quickly, so you'll have to keep replacing it to keep the snail alive.

Cheers,



Don

 

I'm interested to know the rate at which the flamingo tongue snail consumes the gorgonians. I intent to use Erythropodium caribaeorum as the host, and that colony currently encrusts about 1 square foot in my tank. The gorgonian's size doubles about every two years (roughly). I intend to introduce one snail. About how long will it take for the snail to run out of food?

 

It wont eat it that fast, one snail should be ok

 

they go a little faster than that because they cause premature gorg death....they don't really start at one side and work to the other, they just indiscriminately feed....

 

Yeah that had occured to me. It won't really solve the problem of the gorg encrusting everything since they probably just start right at the location where I actually want the gorg.

Somehow I remember reading that they also will avoid eating the host to death, although I don't know how that would work in an aquarium since its either it or them.

Anyway the guy threw in an extra snail, and I put em in, so ...I'll try to follow up and let you know how it goes on this since there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of experience with these guys. So far they haven't really started eating. One of them is on strike, stuck on the glass looking pretty and the other one is m.i.a. and probably mad because I pulled him off the glass to show him where the food is...

 

Flaming tongue update

So its been almost 2 weeks since putting in the snails... The one has just been hanging out on the glass since I put it in... So I finally gave in after it fell off the glass yesterday, and put it right on top of the gorgs. It looks like he's chowed about a 1 in-sq area around where I put it. Unless the gorgs just look dead there since he was hanging out there all day. They definitely changed color and no longer have polyps. Not sure if they devour the entire mat, or just munch on the polyps or what. I hope this host is the right species for this sucker... The other snail is still MIA.