Cleaner Shrimp Eating Snails

[tropicalwaters]

After the addition of some snails, i noticed my skunk cleaner eating a cerith snail. he grabbed it and pulled it out and ran away with it and ate it. I never knew that they did this? He gets fed along with my fish, and i make sure he gets some of whatever is being fed that day. Has this happened to anyone else?

 

[SkiFletch]

Its very very rare for them to do this to live snails. Especially cause live snails will close their trap door making this pretty much impossible. If the snail dies though, the shrimp can/will scavenge it...

 

[@ombomb]

agrred, cleaners will eat just about anything, but they are opportunists rather the predators and snail have more than adequate defense mechanisms to keep them off if they do get attacked.

much MUCH more likey the snail died / was dieing and the shrimp saw an easy meal

 

[tropicalwaters]

I did think that was strange. The snail was crawling around for a while until the shrimp jumped on him and pulled him out. The snail must have been dyieng because i then saw the shrimp try to pull another snail out, but was unsucessful.

 

[Donya]

IME skunk cleaners don't have enough arm power to do that to a healthy snail, even one as small as a Cerith. Killing and eating healthy operculate snails successfully requires a fair amount of strength. It would take a pretty bad injury or the snail being near death or already dead for it to not be able to close up.