How important are snails?

[chandigz]

Babalonian snails, often called orange spotted nassarius snails. They are preditors as well as scavengers. They will eat other snails, tridacna clams, scallops, and other inverts. They are not what I would call totally reefsafe.

[Starry]

Tonga narcs or conches. narcs are carnivors, but only eat dead stuff.. to the OP..tried putting the clams up on the rock work?

[Proteus]

I have one of the same snails. Sold to me as a peanut snail.
Verocias eaters. Watched mine strip a mussle in 5 minutes

I never had issues with being predatory. And if I feed and the snails and hermits explode with activity I take this as a sign to feed a little more

Try tossing two small half shells in

[asylumdown]

I've never seen them behaving in a predatory manner, just voracious. They never seen to get full, and their little mouth tube can stretch to pretty unbelievable lengths if they're trying to get at something in a hard to reach spot. When I was trying to catch my tang, I kept thinking the fish were eating the food in the trap and I was just missing it, until I realized the snails would climb up on the outside, and stick their mouth bits in through the breathing holes on the trap. I think one of them extended his feeding tube like 3 inches in to the trap to get at the mysis...

I'm going to reduce the number and see if one or two snails still causes me grief