What is that? Its a Stomatella Snail

The Stomatella Snail 

What is That? The first thing that you say when you see one of these strange looking snails. 

The Stomatella snails are extremely Beneficial to a Reef Tank, and make a great part of the clean up crew. These snails are often hard to find any information about unless you know their name, and to many reefer, this is the first they are even hearing of them, or they happen to come across this post because they are desperately searching for what these guys are. They are sometimes searched using the phrase "snail that looks like lost his shell", "Slug with a small shell", or even Snail with a half or missing shell".

The Stomatella Snail are herbivores that love to eat algae and micro algae. They are very fast moving snails and are often found at night along the rock work in your reef aquarium. 

They do reproduce, buy not at an alarming rate, and will not harm your tank or its inhabitants. The three and six line wrasse will eat stomatella snails, so be sure to keep them safe if you see them. They will drop a part of their body to help get away and hide from predators.

The New YouTube Reef Tank Build

                     The YouTube Tank Build Is Underway!!

Thanks to ARC Reef, We just Received our Reef Rock to begin the Aqua scape. Our YouTube Viewers and Subscribers will be able to voice their opinions and ideas that will allow them to have a major impact on the outcome of this build!

We will be filming the progress of this build the whole way through, our viewers will not miss anything that goes on during this build!! It is so important that we teach as many people as possible about how important the reefs in the oceans are to our planet!

We owe many thanks to ARC Reef for sponsoring us and our channel. Be sure to check out their website, For every pound of live rock they sell they plant 10 pounds back into the ocean!! So by purchasing your live rock from ARC Reef, you are helping rebuild the oceans reefs!! So far they have planted over 200,000 pounds of reef material, and they have created over 43,500 sq ft. of New Coral Reefs of the Coast of Maimi Florida, Called Heart Reef!!!

Would you like to Donate to Eric's Marine Life? We have started a Go Fund Me account and all that is donated will be used to help with buying equipment and tools for the reef tanks, corals, and supplies for the reef tanks.  We will also be using money donated to help with the YouTube Tank Build!! Because the whole Tank build process will be filmed, you will get to see everything we put in to it, and you can even be a part of the build by commenting and giving your imput on our YouTube Channel, Eric's Marine Life!!

Go Here Now To Donate To Eric's Marine Life!!

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Copepods and Amphipods, Facts and Breeding Tips and Tricks

Copepods are extremely important to a well balanced aquarium ecosystem, not only are they extremely beneficial, but they are also an important food source required by some species to survive.

Copepods and Amphipods are a natural part of the plankton food chain, so they will naturally occur in a saltwater aquarium. If you already have a well established tank you probably see many of the little guys on the glass of your aquarium, in the substrate and even on your rocks.

If your tank has not been going long you can easily buy them from many different online vendors. If you want to breed them like we do to ensure your population never depletes check out our YouTube video above. 

Its not to hard to breed pods, just get a 10 galloon tank, have your salinity at around 1.023, temperature around 78 Degrees F, and add chaeto, they love to breed in the stuff, we even added a small amount of substrate and rubble from our live rocks, then some pinky's filter floss from our sump, they were already breeding in it in the sump so we simply transferred it over. We add phytoplankton til the water has a green tint, when the water begins to clear after a few days you just add more, giving the little guys plenty to eat. We also added a small amount of fish flakes or pellets just to ensure we have enough for them to eat. We add fresh Chaeto to their tank and only keep the lights on the pod tank about 2-4 hrs a day. To transfer our pods we will take a small bit of the water, pick up the chaeto and shake it out giving us several hundred at a time, sometimes we will use our Pod Condo, video below, it makes transferring pods extremely easy. Water Changes are very important when breeding pods, you don't want your parameters to get to crazy, and they always breed better right after a water change. 

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Saltwater Clean Up Crew and the Algae they help with

Saltwater Clean up Crews and what types of Algae they help with...

Since the 1980s the phrase "clean up crew" has been used by aquarist and hobbyist, and is used to refer to various small invertebrates used in keeping a reef aquarium clear of pest algae.

The 3 most popular are blue legged hermit crabs, turinaria snails and emerald crabs. Then you have scarlet hermit crabs, limpets, peppermint shrimp, brittle stars, copepods, arthropods, astrea snails, bumble bee snails, nassarius snails, nerite snails, turbo snails, drawf snails, margarita snails, skunk shrimp, sea urchins, and other sea stars.

Different types of marine animals are used for different types of algae, you can use Cerates, Nerites and blue legged hermits to help with Cyano, which is basically a red slimy mess which is long and stringy, and is brownish and sometimes a powdery mess on your aquarium glass and rocks.

You can use ceriths, nerites, astreas, turbos, limpets, chitons and amphipods to help with film algae, which is a micro algae that covers the aquarium glass like a dust.

Blue legged Hermits, Scarlet hermit crabs, turbo snails, limpets, and chitons are the kind of crew you need for long hair algae, which is pretty easy to id, Its usually caused from to much nitrates and phosphates.

Diatoms usually occur after a saltwater tank cycles and is caused from sand or rock or something plastically has recently been added to the tank, ceriths, nerites and chitins are usually the best guys for this job.

Green bubble algae looks like tiny bubbles all over your rock and grows incredibly fast, it can dominate a tank in a month if not taken care of. You will need Emerald crabs for this job. Juvenile emerald crabs are a little better, the smaller the better, so they can really grab hold of the algae without bursting the bubbles. You don't want this algae to spread all over your tank.

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