Top Crown Snails: Awesome Algae Eaters

I absolutely love my two Top Crown Snails. They are excellent algae eaters – they eat pretty much everything off of the glass of my 75 gallon saltwater aquarium. It’s actually almost unbelievable to me how much stuff these snails eat. I’ve never had any other type of snail, large or small, with such a voracious appetite.

And it’s not just the fact that the Top Crown Snails have a huge appetite – it’s the fact that they have a huge appetite for all the stuff that grows that drives me crazy. The brown algae, the diatoms, the green algae and other junk. If I don’t like it and have found it a nuisance growing on my glass and hardware, these snails have eaten it.

From liveaquaria.com:

The Top Crown Snail is a great tank cleaner for larger saltwater reef aquariums. Compared to its Caribbean counterparts, this snail hailing from the Eastern Pacific Ocean is impressive in size and appetite. This member of the Astraeinae family is dressed in a beautiful shell that develops a remarkable top-like shape.

Yep that pretty much sums it up.

Here’s a quick shot of a couple Top Crown Snails hanging from a feeding ring that is floating about within an aquarium.

As you can see, these have some girth. And they can get much larger. I’ve found one of these snails crawling into my protein skimmer even. He didn’t go inside, but was getting close.

They can also move really fast when they want to, but in a snail type of way. One moment you will see it on one side of the tank, and the next minute it’s on the other side of the tank. But you won’t see it move in between. I think they teleport sometimes.