Fighting Conch

[Nemain]

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.

Beth

[EmilyB]

Originally Posted by muck

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?

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

[Quinn]

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?

[Cap'n]

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.

[Keen]

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