Orange Marble Snail

Babylonia Snails are beautifully decorated gastropods found in sandy or muddy substrates, to a depth of 20m (66ft).

These snails are excellent scavengers and will actively sift through the substrate in their search for food items, keeping the sand bed turned over. Babylonia Snails prefer an established aquarium with live rock and a fairly deep sand bed. They will spend a lot of time buried in the sand with just their elongated proboscis protruding as they move along. The moment any meaty fish food is added to the aquarium, they will promptly emerge and begin their eager search for the source of the food smell.

Whilst Babylonia Snails are attractive and efficient scavengers, they are a mildly predatory species, and there have been some reports of them preying on smaller gastropods and tridacnid clams. Therefore these semi-aggressive snails should be added with caution to tanks containing such livestock. If the aquarium is large enough and maintained properly, it should support a decent sized population of smaller snails, and if kept well-fed, the Babylonia Snails should not have a deleterious effect on them. However, do avoid keeping with tridacnid clams and other bivalves. May also be seen on sale as Orange Spotted Snails or labelled with the misnomer Fancy/Speckled Nassarius Snails - but they are not true Nassarius Snails.

Babylonia species belong to the family Babyloniidae, which reside in the superfamily Muricoidea (predatory sea snails), whereas Nassarius Snails are from the family Nassariidae, which forms part of the superfamily Buccinoidea along with the true whelks.