Acclimating my inverts

My sea hare is in a ball behind the rocks right now... I've heard that they are more active at night so I hope he is sleeping???? I had to turn off one of my powerheads because if he got on the sand he rolled like a tumbleweed to one end of the tank!! The turbos arent really doing much either but they all have been in there for less then 12 hours so hopefully they are adjusting...

 

Like I said I've just always heard to acclimate inverts for a long time... I don't know if I'm right or wrong but you would think that it couldn't hurt anything. But I also have never added snails and had no die off. Granted I usually don't buy less then 50 but still I always have a little die off. It really surprised me to hear some people get lucky enough to not have any die!!

 

I do the same thing 20-30 minutes which i confirmed with 25yr LFS owner. No inverts have ever died in my experience. I think people go overboard a bit which is probably a good thing. But there is no reason to really. The relationship between the sensitivity of inverts and the time of acclamation has not been studied extensively. In my experience they were extremely hardy. One snail was accidentally left outside in an empty plastic bag all day long with no water. I dropped it in my tank, still alive and growing.

The only thing that really concerns me is the temperature of the container outside of the aquarium, the one with the inverts. There will be a significant change in temperature due to the lack of a heater in there, especially in the winter time. I don't use heaters in there, don't trust them without controllers.

When i get the snails, i add the water and the snails to a small container. Then add 1 cup of aquatium water every 5 minutes for 20 -30 min. Thats about it.

 

Well, I didn't have 0 die. I had a few limpets die within a couple of weeks.

A couple of dwarf ceriths died, but I had like 90 of them.

Having just a few die out of 150-200 snails to me seemed more like nature and shipping... if the acclimation was 'wrong' I would have expected some level of "mass die-off".

But maybe I was lucky and my levels matched the shippers well(?) or something... I don't know for sure which acclimation method is 'best' for inverts... but just floating worked great for me.

(BTW - several months later and I still haven't had any mass die-off. I did lose my Chitons a few weeks ago and a couple of Nerites fell out of the tank and died before I found them and I lost a couple of Fl Ceriths to my hermits though).

 

I open my bags and clip them to the side of my hood so that the bag stays in the water and keeps it at a steady temp with the tank. I leave the top of the bag out of my water of course;D