MTS must be one of the toughest creatures on the planet.

So I'm in the middle of setting up a new saltwater tank for dwarf lionfish.  I decided to setup and cycle a qt at the same time to get a head start.  I had a marineland 5.5 gallon that I had intended on using for an ATO reservoir but didn't.  and I had shut down a freshwater tank recently so I decided to reuse the AC20 for the QT tank.  I rinsed it out(I thought) and set it up and dosed ammonia to get things going.  Now the cycle had progressed to the point in the DT and QT that Ammonia was being processed quickly but Nitrite was high even though Nitrate had started to rise.  There was a bit of crud in the QT from the freshwater filter as I hadn't gotten it as clean as I thought and yesterday I noticed a piece of the crud moved.........it was an MTS that had been embedded in the filter sponge.  Now imagine what that little snail has gone through.  He was hanging on to life in a shutoff filter waiting for the remaining water to evaporate and die.  He's plunged into a new tank which is filled with cold tap water, brought up to 79 degrees and then has salt mix dumped in to bring it up to 1.025 over the course of two days and I didn't notice him for a week.  I moved him over to the DT because it has diatoms now and it appears to be happily munching away on them.




My respect for the toughness of this little cleaners has grown for sure.