Nassarius/Periwinkle snail care?

Anyone have any tips?
Food/SG/tank size per...
Abandoning the FW snail/Ghost shrimp setup...for now.. /DesktopModules/ActiveForums/themes/_default/emoticons/smile.gif

 

Well SaltWaterloo, I'm still somewhat new to it myself, but in my bazillion hours of reading over the last couple months...
I plan to go with some sort of reef addition eventually when I get to full marine, I've heard a good mix of 50/50 from people with puffs+reefs...
The soft corals they tend to nip at more, hard not as much, if at all.
I've seen people have luck with them mixing with other fish that have been told specifically not to, and all went well. Some challenge that and say "as they get older" things may change.. At the same time one guy talks about putting a GSP in a tank with 15 other larger fish all different species, but the first night after, he awoke to find all 12 huddled in a corner as the 1.5" GSP was swimming around the tank like it was his..
So I think it depends upon each individual scenario...
I myself had issues when I added 2 GSP's to the tank with just 1 GSP in it. The 1 challeneged the others, tried multiple times to show his dominance...
At the time I didn't have to work so I could hang out on my pc all day and watch the tank, I was actually able to condition them...
If the 1 went for the others, I would just stick my finger up to the tank and point at him, follow him around, and then after a couple times he got the idea. Not sure if he was just scared of my hand, or he actually realized that he should leave them alone.. To this day all 3 fish "know" what the finger point means and they back off from what they're doing...
I can still clean the substrate and they'll swim all around my hand in the tank..
I can shake a can of bloodworms in front of the tank and get everyone's attention that it's feeding time, feeding at random times, the bottle shake works.
They'll eat a lot, and from experience, my 3 puff's can go through 15-20 snails in about 45 seconds, and still want more. But by that time they're nice and fat.. lol
Otherwise ya, I could go on with different things I've noticed they respond to, but ya, they are quite intelligent.
When I put the dragon goby in, all 3 basically looked at it, and then at me watching, and approached it, but didn't go into "attack mode", after I did the pointing thing, which is quite obvious, they look like a rabid dog quirkin it's neck and staring at the target..
Otherwise when I put a crawdad in the other night, they looked at it, and at me, no pointing that time or me getting up close to the tank, so they had at it.
Took em about an hour to two though after cornering it to finally get at it...
And ya, I would agree with ya mthomp if I havn't seen a lot of people on forums here and there actually have luck with them...
I think one of the biggest things is that we (humans) don't know that much about them. If you go searching for puffer water parameters for GSP's, you'll find 5-10 different opinions of what the "facts" are..
Otherwise don't know about the other puffers, but GSP's weren't successfully mated in captivity until last year. That was some Florida school and they actually didn't even get the fish to mate, it was human intervention injections or something....
./shrug
Just my .02$ /DesktopModules/ActiveForums/themes/_default/emoticons/smile.gif
They're great, I enjoy them so much more than just some goldfish or something, they are QUITE self aware little creatures for being fish...