Will water changes keep snail populations down?

[dereks]

A new CO2...what, tank? Did you not have CO2 running for awhile? CO2 lowers pH values and snails cannot maintain their shell integrity as well in lower pH causing shell erosion which is usually deadly to them. So if you didn't have CO2 for awhile snail population could increase then adding CO2 again caused a decrease.

Hard to ID moss in general but probably java moss. Small plant in the bottom right looks like a crypt of some kind and a bit of water wisteria, picture is cut off and bit fuzzy.

Oops, I didn't see the second page of responses when I asked about that plant for the second time, my bad. Thanks for the input.

 

[dereks]

Oh and to answer your question I meant that I had not been running CO2 for a while, then replenished it.

 

[Tifftastic]

Tiftastic, they are the top ones in your pic.

Also, does anyone know what that plant in the bottom right of my tank is called? From a couple posts back ^^^^

I've been trying to figure it out and now I have friends asking too!

Thanks!

The top one are malaysian trumpet snails. They're a bit of a pain to get rid of completely, even with copper. But if you feed lightly and gravel vacuum often they aren't too much of a problem. They only eat dead plant matter and left over fish food. Because they dig through the substrate they actually will benefit your plants by keeping a lot of detritus down and the substrate from getting too compact, making it easier for roots to grow.

 

[myswtsins]

I love MTS (malaysian trumpet snails). I find they don't reproduce as quickly as other pest snails and like Tiff said they are beneficial for turning over the substrate. But if you still want to get rid of them, baiting them with a piece of par-boiled lettuce after lights out and removed before lights is a good way to reduce their numbers at the least. But now that you have CO2 running again I bet their numbers go down anyways.