assassin snail food??

austinpetemo

austinpetemo

AC Members
Sep 25, 2007
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Newton Falls, OH
if assassin snails eat all of their "prey" snails. what do you feed them cuz i know that they wont eat algae.
 
You can try just about any snails you want to dispose such as ramshorns, MTS, pond snails, bladder snails and extra apple snails. I keep mine fed with a constant supply of MTS and sometimes bloodworms and a few turtle sticks.;)
 
so they dont HAVE to have snails? they can be suplimented with commercial foods. cuz i dont think ill run out of MTS if i get some but thats always a possibility.
 
Any high protien food should work but bloodworms, High protien pellets, and snails are the top 3 I would recommend.

When they are not fed snails breeding slows way down as does growth form my observations. Also the survival rate of young plummets.
 
austinpetemo said:
so they dont HAVE to have snails? they can be suplimented with commercial foods. cuz i dont think ill run out of MTS if i get some but thats always a possibility.
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They do consume commercial foods but only to an extent in comparison to bloodworms and snails. If I were you, keep your snail supply constant. Assassins in nature prefer snails and bloodworms above the rest.
 
well this is certainly interesting. i really dont know much about them. are they a forgiving hardy species or do they die with the slightest water imperfection??? and just how many snails do they eat. like 1 per day or like, lots per day?
 
The number of snails consumed depends on the size of the snail prey. My inch assassins can consume 2-3 snails in a day, the size of almost half to 3/4 an inch. For larger ones, well, they can consume only 1-2 a day, that's it.

Assassins are quite hardy specimens. I got my first five in a container with no water but only plants. As long as they remain damp, they can survive a travel like that. It takes them a few hours though before they recover completely.
 
so in a colony of mts will they eventually kill off all the MTS or will the MTS population grow faster than the demands of the growing population of assassins?
 
austinpetemo said:
so in a colony of mts will they eventually kill off all the MTS or will the MTS population grow faster than the demands of the growing population of assassins?
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Well, adult assassins prefer snails that are bite sized or at least half an inch and over. Anything smaller than that are ignored completely and will be sorted by the young assassins. Assuming your assassins have not reproduced yet, the MTS population will remain sustainable as the babies are ignored largely and a few adults continue producing more snails. On the other hand, if the number of baby assassins keep growing, then the problem arises when the baby MTS are eliminated one by one thus there may be very little or none at all to breed anymore by the time they finished off a large dent of MTS population.

I had to wait for almost two months for my own assassins to lay eggs. Like Sounguru explained earlier, if your food supply plummets, so will your assassin snails' reproduction rate and the survival rate of your future baby assassins. Get a 5-10g tank as a backup plan in case you cannot sustain the number of MTS in your assassin snail tank. I keep plenty of MTS in four tanks right now to keep the number consistent and sustainable enough for me. MTS can proliferate fast if you provide plenty of foods for them.
 
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