Could it be a feather duster worm? Does it move to different spots on the shell?My halloween Hermit crab seems to have a snail riding aboard it. I thought all the creatures on its shell were dead, but I guess not. It's got black antenna and a black siphon shaped mouth it uses to grab food from the rock the hermit crab is eating from. It has made a round turban shaped shell. What is it? My friend thinks it's a slipper snail, but I wanted to make sure.
Slipper limpet/slipper snail is a good guess - I’d add hoof snail to the list of possibilities too. I need to do a bit more studying up on the differences between these groups to tell for sure which one you have (I know some hoof snails use a long proboscis - the siphon mouth - for feeding this way, I’m not sure if some slipper limpets/snails do too or not), but - either way - they’re harmless to their host and neutral/good for a reef tank.My halloween Hermit crab seems to have a snail riding aboard it. I thought all the creatures on its shell were dead, but I guess not. It's got black antenna and a black siphon shaped mouth it uses to grab food from the rock the hermit crab is eating from. It has made a round turban shaped shell. What is it? My friend thinks it's a slipper snail, but I wanted to make sure.
It generally doesn't move. It's been there the whole time I've had this hermit crab(about a week and a half), today is the first time I saw it extend to feed.
Did it look like this
I looked up hoof snails, and found a picture that was 1 to 1 of what I saw. The black antennae and the proboscis. Sorry, I called it a siphon earlier.
Nope. It had a proboscis, and no feathers.
No problem - I’m still picking up a lot of the technical terms myself, and the way you described it was good enough to get the idea across (which is the important part with things like this from a hobbyist perspective). Glad you were able to confirm the ID, and welcome to Reef2Reef!
Some of these snails are known to basically grow onto/into the shell of their host (though I don’t think they typically would grow into the cavity of the shell, just the wall of the shell). If it was a slipper limpet/snail or hoof snail on the hermit, I’d imagine the extra weight on the shell would have been the problem rather than the snail itself, as from everything I’ve read, the snails are harmless.
He was a small electric blue hermit so all that extra weight was too much, I was confused at why it didn’t move back into it‘s old shell so I decided to intervene.
I have found that hermits will sometimes just pick up a shell too big for them. Give them some time to grow the muscles and they will start being active again. I recently had a Dwarf Zebra move into a conch shell(I guess she wanted to match the size of the Halloween), and it took her a few days to adjust to that shell.
