I have a serious question about the assassins. while watching my tank last night where I have been breeding assassins I noticed that my favorite female assassin had a gaping hole in the back of her shell. It looked pretty fresh too--all the way to the meat. I have done no maintenance in the tank other than regular WC's and filter servicing so I don't think her shell was damaged and it looks like a piece of her shell was just removed. I am wondering if assassins eat each other? Also of note, the pond snail population was wiped out (by me--I took them out) so there are only small pond snails in the tank that are growing out since I removed the adult pond snails. There is more....my baby assassins have been disappearing. I thought perhaps that they were just buried in the substrate. It is really odd. I am thinking that the adult assassins ate the younger A.H. snails. The tank has plenty of MTS's in it--why didn't the adult assassins eat them instead? Has anyone experienced this decline in assassins? BTW-my water parameters have been stable:
pH: 6.7/zero amonia/no nitrites/nitrates <20. WC are done on a regular basis about every 7 days.
Okay let's look at this in steps:
#1 You females shell was probably weakened from a lack of minerals and calcium in her diet. Once that happend the ends of Assassin snail shells can and do break off. I noticed this in my original 5 wild caughts I got. All had broken ends a couple quite severe.
#2 There are no recored evidence or even reliable reports of Assassains eating other Assassins. Only here say and speculation at this point. Not saying yea or nay as to if this can happen just that evidence does not support it at this time.
#3 From your water conditions and tank conditions I expect a decline and I will expand up on that in a minute.
#4 If Assassins were eating other Assassins the shells would be left behind as evidence. Assassins do not eat the shells.
So now that I have answered most of your questions lets look at how to change your results if you really want to breed Assassins like a pro.
First off you really need to increase the PH to 7.4 or higher and increase your hardness to moderately hard or plain on real hard. This can be done in many ways and to cut back on the length of this I will leave that to others to explain because this is gonna be a long post as is.
Now from my studies the average hatch rate of Assassin eggs is around 75% of those laid. Understand that this is over a 2 month+ period of time since it seems that the eggs can delay hatching for some time. Now the # of snails you will see that come up out of the substrate when they are a little larger is about 50% of your 75% that hatched and 50% of those will survive to reach adulthood for the normal hobby breeder. So out of 100 eggs laid two dozen or so will reach adulthood in a normal tank. Right now I will have someone go well I have 50 adults how can you say that. Well that is because there were another 100+ eggs hidden in yout tank that you never saw. Assassins are real good at hiding their eggs.:evil_lol:
Now if you want to raise your #'s there are a few things that need to happen.
#1 Increase your feeder snails not only by # but by types 100 fold. In my 29 gallon on 4-11-09 I had 400+ Rams 600+ Mts and an unknown # of bladder snails. For referance look
here and it is time to start looking for more because with 40 adultas and an untold # of babes I am down to 1/2 of those #'s now.
#2 You need a constant supply of calcium and calcium rich food for the breeders this serves 2 purposes
A: Assassins get most of their calcium and minerals from what they eat.
B: This gives the feeder snails enough food and favorable conditions to breed so you will have snails of all sizes in your tanks.
#3 Use a sponge filter or a sponge/bag intake over your filter baby assassins like to float in the current and can be gobbled up in unprotected filter intake. I remove 5 to 10 babes from my canister every cleaning and that doesn't count the # that die off in the filter and are never seen. Yes I know I really ned to cover my intake but I'm hurtin as is since I have assassin eggs on the intake tube right now...:lipssealedsmilie: I plan on plumbing my canister into a sponge filter on this tank but until I can do some rearranging of my breeding tank that will have to wait. Which requires me setting up another tank to shift stuff for the rescape...:irked:
#4 Get that PH and Hardness up. I suspect your decline is caused by the babes not being able to form there shells correctly and lack of food in the tank.
I have achieved about a 75% survival rate of the eggs I see of reaching adulthood by following these steps.
So in conclusion please forgive my horrid spelling and aimless rambling.... I just hope it makes sense to you like it does in my head.
