What Killed My Snail? with pic

[Samw]

Hi Bev.

Did you ever find your snail killer? Recently, I've had dozens of Trochus snails die that I've had for years. Last week, during the day, I saw a zebra hermit and some bristleworms eating a freshly dead snail. Just now, I am watching a zebra hermit and some bristleworms eat another freshly dead snail. Then I remembered what happened. The snail that they are eating was a snail that I knocked off the glass with the cleaning magnet just hours earlier. I knock snails off the glass often when I'm cleaning the glass and in the past (before I added the zebra hermit crab into the tank) they've always gotten back up. So the fact that I just recently added the zebra hermit to my tank and that the dead snails started to appear recently and that most of the dead snails were found near the front glass of the tank and that I found the hermit eating the snail that I just knocked off the glass hours earlier made me conclude that the zebra hermit is my snail killer. I had scarlet and blue legged hermits previously and I never had this problem with snails being killed. So I'm going to take out the zebra hermit now.