Fighting Conch
 

Anyone local have a Fighting Conch in their tank..??
If so, where did you pick it up from..?? and how much..??

Don't the fighting conch get very large?

Oops your right they get to 4"... :redface:

I mixed up the names.
I am actually after information on 'Strawberry Conchs'
These are supposed to only get to around 1" long.

I got a strawberry conch from Aquaria Canada. They ship nicely, he is cute as a button too =)

Beth

I have emailed Ivan about availability already. :biggrin:
So far so good he emailed me back in 5 minutes...

Sure would love to see a picture of yours if you have one.

You got a reply? I'm still waiting on a reply about replacement bulbs from 4 months ago!

Actually, fighting conches are more or less identical in size to strawberry's.

You're thinking of the queen conches, which when small look identical to fighters but get to be football sized.

However there are so many different species of conch though that get called one thing or another that it's probably a bit of a moot point. I think I've seen at least 6 distinct species imported as "fighting conch" ... they can't all be correct.

Good point Tony. Ive came to that conclusion as well.
As long as it doesn't get enormous or (I get a whelk sold as a conch)

My strawberry doesn't work nearly as hard as my fighting conchs.

I have one large FC (2") and several small ones. If you get them from J&L you will be sure you are getting the right ones. :biggrin:

Thanks for the info Deb. Do you remember what you picked them up for?
I can't seem to find them on the J&L site?

If you havent heard from him, I would mail again. I know they had a server issue a while back. He is usually very prompt.

I will try to get a pic of the little critter tonight if I can =) But ill warn you, my pictures suck. :redface:

Beth

Now you got me thinking. Someone picked them up for me, and now I think maybe he got them from Ocean Aquatics.... :confused: :redface: They were $5 ea.

Fighting conchs (Strombus alatus) can actually grow to nearly double the size of strawberry conchs (Strombus luhuanus), but I've never heard of it in captivity... most of the time they seem to be a maximum of 3" in length. As Tony said, Strombus gigas is the big one as far as aquarists are concerned. Also as Tony said, you have to be pretty cautious about assigning positive IDs to these animals... how many people have bought "cleaning crew conchs" and found out they were predatory?

Right here. Bought two; never realized my mistake until I saw one of my biggest, nicest trochus being finished off. Nabbed that sucker real quick but couldn't find the other for a couple months. When I did get it I noted an increase in size of about 10%. No idea how many snails and such I lost.

i had the same problem. i bought two of what i thought were queen conch's ,but then i noticed my snail population dramatically decreasing. thats when i did a little more research and found out that what they were selling as queen conch's were actually tulip conch's which are very predatory towards snails. I quickly disposed of the offending tulips and bought more snails to replace all the ones that got eaten