depending on the fish you have in your tank your fish my be eating the snails. But as a variable in your tank they are sign that there is lots of uneaten food in you tank and just so you know once you use that chem in your tank you will never get rid of the copper from the tank it will embed in the glass and leach into the water killing any inverts and shorten the life of all fish you put in there. I would use a trap if you feel you must get rid of the snails but I would just let them be and cut the feeding you give your fish to cut the population of snails.
Today 07:00 PM
Just to be clear, excess food of any sort will cause an increase in population, that includes algea not just fish food.
I personally would not under any circumstances put any copper product in my fish tanks ever!
In case that wasn't clear I really wouldn't personally recomend using copper.
it will hang around, and it is damaging to most life forms at some level or another. The snail trap will work, I've found lettuce to be less effective than the above mentioned algea wafers, and cucumber also works well for me. It may take some time, but you can hand pick snails out and eventually get them all.
The other thing is i see them only occationally out and about but when i vacume the gravel i see alot of them.
This sounds like MTS's not pond snails, MTS's burrow, as a rule pond snails don't. The MTS Malaysian trumpet snail is shaped like an ice cream cone, and has an operculum (trap door) the really cool part is that in cases of bad water conditions, they will close the trap door, and wait out the undesireable period. Many folks have had them survive copper treatment in this manner. I tend to believe that the copper would eventually get them, as it is difficult to remove and pretty toxic even at reduced levels, but you may be dissapointed.
My snail traps don't usually attract a lot of my MTS's but then I don't usually check the traps at night when the lights are off.
On the bright side, MTS's are easier to irradicate by hand simply because they reproduce a bit slower than pond snails and ramshorns. But finding them is still a trick.
And just for the record, pond snails, red Ramshorns, and MTS's are all three a desireable variable from the water quality standpoint. They produce minimal waste, and consume huge amounts of raw material that would otherwise create ammonia in a tank, not to mention the fact that they eat algea. MTS's aren't as fast as the other two with algea, but all three are a benefit in most tanks.
Dave
