What eats snails?

wesleydnunder said:
Some kuhli loaches will eat snails. Mine do.

Mark
Click to expand...
Maybe mine are too well fed then? :) Dunno. All I know is that I have a 36g with three kuhliis and a crapload of pond snails and MTS. The MTS can stay, but I have to take the pond snails out. The 75g with clowns has snail shells all over the bottom of the tank.

What kind of kuhliis do you have? The stripey kind or the blackish ones?

Roan
 
I have the striped ones. A month after I planted my 125 the tank was covered in those little pond snails. Literally hundreds. It seemed like they multiplied daily. About three weeks ago I added six kuhlis that had been in quarantine since I planted the tank. I was gonna add 'em anyway as I love to watch them slither thru the glosso. Since introduction I have maybe 3 dozen left scattered around the tank and little empty snail shells on the bottom. The smoking gun came a week or ten days ago when I actually saw one of them sucking on the opening of a shell. Too bad the little suckers don't eat staghorn algae.

Mark
 
I have to chime in with you all and agree that clowns don't belong in small tanks.

I have kuhli loaches in my 29 gallon tank, the striped and black ones, with red ramshorn snails and they don't seem to eat them. They also don't bother my tiny red cherry shrimp. My botia striata (zebra loaches) do eat snails quite well though and only grow to about 3" but are VERY active.
 
My personal, all time favorite snail killer is the pufferfish.

If your fish tank is swarming in snails, drop in one puffer fish. Remove the next morning, because by then, the snails will all be eaten.

While there are snails, the puffer fish (in my personal experience) will ignore the other fish. They will also patrol your live plants like mad looking for baby snails. They will eat snails as big as they are.

MTS warning - If you have Malaysian Trumpet Snails, their shells are too tough for puffers once they're older. I hate MTS, and never buy plants from any store that has MTS in their tanks. The really big ones, if I remember right, also have a trapdoor that prevents clown loaches from eating them.

But, quick list from my experience:

What I have kept in a community tank:
Bettas (some)
Firemouth Cichlid (These can get... 5-8" I think)
Puffers (Are curious, and have no hands. Thus, instead of touching everything, they bite everything. Can be hypnotized with a stopwatch to obey your plans for world domination.)
Red Clawed Crabs (Can be ok with a community tank, if no one is sleeping on the bottom, though I never personally had a problem.)

Not community safe:
Crayfish (will also eat your plants, your fish... your wallet.. but they make really cool dens)
Piranahs (Not community tank safe, generally)
Oscar (Way to big, and bulky, for a small tank.)
 
Yoyo loaches like to eat snails.. My sister in law has a chanel cat fish and he likes to eat snails..
 
well i guess if you have a small tank a chanel cat fish is not a good choice.. sorry about that.. i just now read that it was a smaller tank
 
when I had my 55 gallon, I had a nice school of skunks that kept the tank under snail control too, but I've heard that they could be troublesome and I my guess is that's probably correct however, I've never had the problem myself.... though my tank was fully loaded with plants and caves.... so I rarely saw them in the open none the less picking on other fish.
 
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