www.cowries.info

[domenico67]

I'd like we share our knowledge and personal experience about cowries in reef aquariums.

I think some species can really be wonderful adds to the nomereef, with their shiny shells but expecially with those gorgeous mantles (Monetaria moneta, with its striking zebra mantle and perfectly reef-safe attitude!).

I'm very aware that many species are not suited for the home aquarium as they are either aggressive towards cosals, or sponge feeders, or something like that so they are simply comdemned to starve till death.

But some are algae eating (I had for quite a long time a gorgeous Macrocypraea cervus which was VERY fond of Nori algae,sushi algae! It ate quite a lot of it, and it even learned to go in the right place where I used to put it!), and maybe some others are detritivorous, and can find food by hiking and grazing on live rocks.

I wonder if species blessed with beautifully coloured mantles (like cribraria and others), are always spongivores or not...

Finally, I've to say that sadly I often experienced debilitation and subsequent death of specimens wich were apparently eating in a regular way and doing well... some say that molluscans, and expecially cowries, look like very strong animals but are instead very sensible to less than perfect levels of nythrates and phosphates...

Thank you all for your contributes!

[rlutan]

Very interesting "domenico67"!!. I have never heard of anyone actually keeping live cowries in an aquarium. I wonder how many other people have done this and how common is this practice?. Must be difficult to keep the salinity just right, just like any saltwater aquarium. Must also be difficult to feed the gastropods. Do you have any pictures of your aquarium with the shells in it?. Where are you located?.
Robert.
_________________
Caribbean seashells were what I collected in the 1980s when I was stationed in Puerto Rico with US. Navy. I had a few rare cowries then. Over the past 1 year I have started collecting cowries seriously again.

[ozcyp]

I know a diver in Hawaii who used to frequently bring live shells back to his aquarium so he could photograph the live animal insitu. A lot of the cowries were returned back to their habitat if they had any flaws. He did share a picture of a tigris who felt so at home in the tank, she went and deposited her eggs and sat on them for sometime in the corner. Unfortunately the larvae could not survive when hatched because of the filter sytem.

I read in another site where helvola were kept with success and seemed to be an oportunistic feeder. The observer noticed the animal feeding on both algae and prawn that was fed to the fish.

The same can't be said of lurida. That animal needs it host sponge to survive in a tank, but once added, can live for sometime.

Any other info on the subject would be very interesting.

Regards,
Iain

[benicypraea]

Hello all:

Some years ago I had the chance to keep in a water tank a specimen of Zonaria pyrum live collected. The animal was living in a time together us with no more food that the green algae that were growing in a stone collected in the same place of collecting. Even it received its own name, we called him "PYRINO"!
Every day I could see the orange proboscis of Pyrino while it was feeding on algae there. It was sincerely, a nice experience for me, but unfortunately, everything is not forever!
After 3 weeks of a confortable life there in the water tank (I changed the water of the tank every 2 days because I didn´t have water filter) I deposited a "friend" also called "Hermit Crab". The disaster came because a few of days later the crab died and pollutioned the water, then the cowry was affected because the bad quality of the water in the tank and suffered a general debilitation and the death just a days later...
Since then, I don´t want to keep live cowries in a water tank because this is not the best way to care this animal. I learned the following lesson:
if I cannot take care of it, I do not do it to avoid a bad experience.
But a marine aquarium is another thing else. If I have someday a TRUE marine aquarium, perhaps I can keep and study the animal for a good time.
Well, this is my personal experience with live cowries in a tank.
Regards,
Beni
_________________
I started to collect seashells since my childhood but I decided to focus on cowries in 1990. I like all kind of cowries, freaks, normal, nigers, dwarfs...
Also I collect conidae and Muricidae.

[domenico67]

More often than not, however, the problem is this: HOW TO GET living cowries?

Here in Italy, you have consistent chances to get only 2 species on a fairly regular basis: tigris and arabica.

This 2 species also have not a very good reputation as homereef critters, as tigris is considered a bulldozer which rearranges liverock setup at its will (which is not true in my experience), and arabica can be sometimes seen biting some invertebrates (even other cowries!), but with very little harm in my opinion. Their quite bad reputation maybe is the main reason of the fact that very few further investigation is made on cowries as home reef inhabitants.

Other species are nuch more difficultly found in the market, and often they are available totally by chance... Over the years I had a cervus (one of the most spectacular for its size and its completely diurnal habits), a mauritiana (which has a veeeery strong foot! but it's quite shy), an erosa, an annulus or two, a limacina, an errones. Everytime, it was a very occasional purchase, sometimes they even were only hitchikers that appeared in sellers' tanks containing newly imported live rock.
I NEVER managed to get a moneta, a poraria, an helvola, which have so beautiful animals and are probably reef-safe. And which, of course, are so common in their habitats.

I know that annulus is quite regularly available on certain websites, mainly in french and in germany. It is considered a good algae grazer. (but, why not the much more spectacular moneta? )

[felix]

if you are familiar with German language you might want to check my "Beitraege zur Kenntnis der Ringkauri Erosaria annulus" Schiften zur Malakozoologie. I have kept annulus in tanks for many years and made them bread successfully, with the following generations markedly smaller-shelled than the parents (some were in the 9 mm range). The difficulty is keeping the veligers happy after hatching.that works in large glass-tubes with aeration but no filtering, exposed to sunlight to support phytoplancton to multiply. Finally the breeding success came by chance, and the result was that one day I spotted a nearly adult one that I had definitely not added to the tank, so I have no clue how it managed to survive. The trick is perhaps to leave the tank alone and not meddle too much with the gear that comes along with it. We currently have several miliaris in our tank, for three years: like annulus, it is a purely vegetarian species that likes to roam around during daytime. We had several spawns but no survivours yet. Over the years, I have kept the following species, but they all demanded conditions I was seemingly unable to provide over longer time: moneta, caputserpentis (seemed to do well for three weeks, then died), felina, gracilis (a matter of days), caurica (ate everything in sight and then died after some weeks), carneola, lynx (both made it for about a week), ovum, errones (several weeks, then disappeared), and venusta sorrentensis (lived for three months but did not touch any of the sponges I could provide). My next project is to get live Calpurnus verrucosus to "infect" the large Sarcophyton-soft corals in our tank. The first attempt to bring home living ones failed because of a flight delay. They are more sensitive to transportation than cowries which usually do well for 24 hours in a Tupperware-box without water (!! important - otherwise they will continue metabolism and poison themselves in the limited amount of water you can take on the plane - even harder these days)

[domenico67]

[felix]

I had different degrees of "pollution" in my tanks, certainly annulus does not seem to care. More importantly, phosphate should not be too low to assist sufficient growth of algae (the opposite is the case for proliferating Acropora, Hystrix, Alveopora, Galaxea and that sort of stuff of course). At some point I had nearly 50 species of stone-coral growing in my tank - it looked great but I lost interest in trying to keep conditions (especially the light) to their likings and decided to make the tank something like a self-supportive ecosystem, so no exchanging the water, no more rowaphos, calcium reactors and on top of all, replacing the light-tubes all the time, etc.) with the result that most stone corals slowly died while certain species are happy, including the Sarcophyton and some weird millepora which never grew before but started to run amok once I left things on idle. The cowries just continued to do their thing, so they seem pretty resistant to whatever changes in those subtle parameters.

[janjakk]

[oceansblue]

Yes, indeed you are able to keep algae eaters cowries in a reef tank. Of course, it is not an easy task, to anyone because you have to spend much more money than a fresh water tank and enouph to keep the swetable conditions of the water including minerals and and water temperature about 28oC/ +-2 winter/summer, day/night (tropical waters conditions). Search the internet for Live rock, sump, skimmer to reallise how a saltwater reef aquarium is working. You can keep Atlandic, Mediterranean and Pacific algae eaters speciments.
Zoilas are not swetable at the momment, because you are not able to keep alive the specific sponges in a small close system as a small saltwater tank, but only some tiny species.
If you use live rock to increase the biology demants and also place for corals, algae and hiding places, you will be able to see your cypraeas only sometimes, during night when the aquarium lights will be swich off.

Unfortunately, there are too many things to know to have such a kind of aquarium. If you are thinking to do it, begin with a freshwater aquarium to learn atleast the basics of an indoor water world.

Nowadays, it is not difficult to find alive cypraeas in the market. You can just order them as the tropical reef fishes in almost all the aquarium shops. Only, be sure about their feeding behavior.

[Guest]

Im going to set up a tank to keep cypraea and appreciate this topic.
There are some questions I want to slove before start.
What about plankton filtering polyps, would they eat all veligers? Does a streamer kill veiligers?
A guide to worldwide Cowries mentions direct development which avoids free swimming stages. Unfortanly there is no information about species who do direct development because they may be easier to breed successfull.