snails

LMOUTHBASS

LMOUTHBASS

My hypocrisy goes only so far
Jun 17, 2003
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Boston , MA
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Mark
ummm why does everyone seem to hate snails, i think their pretty cool so i bought one, plus i figured it woul eat a lot of the junk on the bottom, so far he's one of the most interseting things in my tank!!! just curious im sure theres a reason for this
 
Most people hate them because if left unchecked one day you will wake up to see an explosion of snails in the tank. However, making sure to limit the amount of food the fish get (no over feeding) will drastically reduce the chance of this explosion.

I, however, kind of like snails as well, though I now feed them to my dwarf puffers.
 
I keep a few Apple Snails, Pomacea bridgesi, in my planted tank. They do not eat my plants. More information can be found here.
http://www.applesnail.net/
 
I bought some live plants once a few years ago for a 10 gallon tank i put together. There were a few snails in the mix and I thought it would be kind of cool to have them in the tank. A couple months later my plants were dead and I had about 5o snails in my tank. I doubt I'll ever buy any again.
 
I initially added MTS and a few mystery snails to my community tank, and by not cleaning new plants I got a tankload of nuisance snails as well. The MTS proliferated too rapidly for my taste- I know now that I was overfeeding, but what an ugly sight- a million snails!

The mystery snails irritated me by swarming whatever veggie product I put in for my Farlowellas and Otos. I would move a snail away from the food and three seconds later another one would show up. One night I literally got out of bed 14 times to move snails off zucchini so the fishies could have a chance.

The nuisance snails were.... a nuisance. For a while we smished every one we saw and I actually thought we stood a chance of killing them all- not so lucky. You miss one day of smishing and you never catch up.
But I learned how to use KMn04 to soak plants :p

When I changed the substrate out I got rid of all the snails you betcha. The new goldfish tank is now blessed with mystery snails :D
 
When I bought some plants for my tank, they arrived with resident snails too. They seemed to multiply very rapidly for about a week, until there was a long line of them just above the water line at the top of the tank. I removed as many as I could catch, (not easy at all) but I couldn't bear to squish em, so I put them in a covered bowl of water with some plants where they are still doing nicely. I got quite attached to the snails, even if they are a nuisance. I think they are really interesting to watch.

They do get rid of a lot of the gunk in the tank, but they also produce a lot of waste, which I noticed in their isolation bowl.
I now feed my fish just once a day instead of 2 or 3 times, and pick out those that I can. This seems to keep the snail population manageable. I think the tank would be a bit sterile without a few snails, but that's just my opinion :)
 
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