ID This snail please?

the pointy end? nope, it's pretty much covered in coralline...

The opening to the shell is rainbow-silveryish.

 

It's either a trochid or a chilodontid (all of which were considered to be in the family Trochidae until recently). I think it's a Diloma species. It would be interesting to know where it originated, since it looks remarkably similar to a species I named from Samoa, Diloma samoaensis:

Diloma samoaensis

It might be another species in the same genus though, many of which are more broad-ranging. Here are some pics of snails in the same family:

Shell Catalogue - Family TROCHIDAE TROCHINAE MONODONTINI

Cheers,



Don

 

Cool.....Congrats Don

BTW, is this you? http://www.manandmollusc.net/conewars/conewars.html

 

i was thinking banded trochus myself

 

Don, Thanks for coming through! I believe you're absolutely correct, it is a trochus of some sort!

I had 3 turbo snails that all died a few weeks apart, and only after they were in my tank for about 2-3 months. They were added the same time as the two trochus. This is what has kept me from getting any more snails at all... But since these trochus seem to do really well, I feel like they have a pretty good survivability rate in reef tanks...

I definitely want more than two trochus in my tank (120 GAL), but don't want too many as so they will eventually out-compete each other... any guess as to a good number to have? I'm thinking somewhere between 10 and 20? Gotta say I really love these snails, as they have always been hard workers, and seem pretty resilient.

Cheers!

Will

 

yeah a few years back when i was researching the perfect CuC I want a bunch of these guys, but my LFS could never get them in :-(

 

Glad to help, Will. A 120 should handle quite a few small trochids without them getting in each others' way, I reckon. It could surely handle 15 or 20, and most of the experts would probably recommend more. Ingtar, it's a relative of the banded trochus, but the tall, convex spire pretty much guarantees it's not that species. And Curt, yes, that's me in the Cone Wars articles. It was funny, I got to know practically all the Conus researchers in the world in the months after I wrote those posts. The series ended up getting translated and republished several times, LOL. I have copies in several different languages, published in various conchological and malacological bulletins. It was really neat watching all the snails from the reef interact.

Cheers,



Don