Do Snails hibenate?(This will determine my buisness @ Petsmart!)

Morbius

Morbius

The Living Vampire
Aug 24, 2006
156
0
0
56
Saginaw Mi
Hello all. I was @ petsmart yesterday looking @ their fish trying to get an idea of what I wanted,and how knowledgeable their employees are.I was "observing" the many tanks they have set up,when I came across 2 tanks with snails(blue mystery,apple and I think your standard? snail).What caught my eye was that 90% of these snails were either.....on their backs,(all u could see was their foot)or,on their side with no movement.I immediately thought.....dead....their all dead...as did a mother and daughter who were thinking of buying one for a family member.Well,they asked the lfs person what was wrong with them and she told them that snails "hibernate" when scared or feel threatened.Now mind you....I saw 1 or 2 snails crawling around on the bottom of the tank,and on the sides....These must be the bravehearts of the clan....not scared,or threatened by anything?????? Someone please clear this up for me,being that I have tried 2 different lfs, and petsmart....in the area I live,is my last and only hope!!!!!
 
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I would say that in general Snails dont hibernate, I could be wrong but to trigger hibernation the water has to be cold...very cold
 
Hello northstar.I didnt get the temp of the tank,but the snails were in company of other fish....didnt get the types of those either....was taken aback by all the "still" snails.
 
I dont know much of snails in aquaria. all I keep is pond snails for a few people who buy them from me, Petsmart usually runs all tanks through a central system keeping the tanks at 70+/- a few degrees. snails do release themselves from glass or fall off things and may wind up on their backs. as long as they dont smell like butox (butt) they should be fine.
 
when one of my golden mystery snails died a couple of weeks ago, it smelled like really really bad breath. i assumed it was dead because it didn't move from my pagoda ornament for the past 3 or 4 days. it must have been trapped or something because it was wedged in. it smelled so bad i couldn't put the thing back in my aquarium.
 
pond snails

In the large koi pond I maintain, the pond snails are still active in the winter (albeit minimally active) when the water dips down to the upper 40's, so I cannot imagine that they would hibernate in any warm-ish aquarium. In my little 5.5g not much "scares" the little devils for long. They are less active under bright light, but that is about it.
 
These snails were'nt active @ all. No Movement.And they were all located in the same area in this state...save for a few scattered in a corner or 2. And once again the question comes to mind: Why were all these snails so called "hibernating" when you had 1 or 2 snails still moving about????
 
the snails were probably disrupted by someone messing around the tank and felt threatened and so they fell off the glass and closed up their trapdoor. if its like my petsmart, all the mystery apple snails are in the plant tanks, so if someone pulled up some plants, they could have knocked the snails around which would have made them close up
 
I have one apple snail who is living quite happily in a new 30ish gal home and is usually quite active. Prior to my move to a new larger apartment he was housed in a 1-2 gal tank with poor temperature control. If it would get very cold (I'm not sure of the exact temperature, but it would feel quite cold to the touch) or there wasn't any food for him to be hunting down he would sometimes close his trapdoor and sit on the bottom of the tank. Under more pleasant conditions, when he's not exploring the tank he will find a spot somewhere and just chill on the side of the tank with his antennae curled up. From my experience they are extremely hardy animals (mine ecaped from his old tank, fell 3 feet down behind my bookshelf, cracked his shell, and wasn't found for over a day and has lived long after to tell the tale) they're just in less than ideal living conditions. They might just need to be fed more/more often.
 
When I first got mine 3 out of 4 stayed closed in their shells for about 4 days. I was starting to freak. I wouldn't call it hibernation exactly, but they did hid for awhile. Could it be that Petsmart just got these in and they were still scared?
 
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