Strawberry conch mating?

[Uptightjoker]

Hello reefer friends, I have a pair of strawberry conches in my 40B. Usually they just ignore each other and run around doing their ownthing. However this morning when I came out to the tank the conches were as pictured. They were like this about 30 minutes and then went on their way. So I was curious if they were mating and if they were the chances of any babies surviving without any intervention.

 

[Ron Reefman]

IMHO, and I'm no expert, they just happened upon each other and maybe one was cleaning/eating algae off the other ones shell. I see other algae eaters doing that a lot.

If one ended up laying an egg case, the chances of getting any young to survive to more than a short time is kind of unlikely. Conch egg cases typically have thousands of young inside and in the wild, very few survive. If you have any carnivores like a crab or even a fish, they would likely eat any young that hatch out.

But that's just an uneducated opinion.