Snail tank - changing substrate

Z

Zydrunas

AC Members
Sep 17, 2007
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I have a 12 gallon snail tank with some Spixis and MTS in it, with plain pfs substrate. I recently bought some Seachem Onyx Sand for planted tanks, and the LFS said it would be ok with the snails. I have 2 questions: 1) is this substrate ok for the snails, and 2) how do you change the substrate when you have burrowing snails? I thought about manually plucking them out (remove the sand from the tank, then go through small portions of it at a time to find the snails) but an looking for any other suggestions on how to do it.

Oh, and another request - any tips for netting shrimp? They're FAST!
 
update

Today was the day. I took ~4 gallons out into a 5 gallon bucket, netted the hatchet fish and put them in there with the plants and driftwood. Put my sponge filter in there so I had lots of time to do things right. I then netted the shrimp into a special bowl that I had put all my java moss in, so they were happy. My Spixis cooperated greatly by all of them either being on the driftwood or my plants, so they just went along for the ride. I then manually removed the sand into another bucket and set it aside.

With the tank empty, I put the new, well rinsed substrate into the tank and slowly added some water to bring the level up. Put the hatchets in, then the spixis, then the shrimp. Then I went through the sand I removed by hand ans found my black trumpet snails that were hiding in there and placed them back into the tank.

As of right now the tank is crystal clear (3 hours later), the shrimps are all nice and red again, and the hatchets are happily swimming around. I'm about to toss in some shrimp jell-o (edit: snail jell-o) (they LOVE it) so that the snails feel right at home again.

All-in-all, it took a couple hours and I didn't lose a single thing! I consider that a success.
 
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