apple snail

okiemavis

That pH is fine- what is your kh and gh? I usually add Equilibrium by Seachem to raise my gh (it's just a bunch of calcium powder and stuff). But you shouldn't do that unless you can measure your hardness.

Little-Fizz, ph and hardness are different things. Ph is NOT a measure of hardness or calcium content. I, for instance, have *very* soft water with a ph of 8.6. KH and GH are the measures hardness. Neither of those will tell you how much calcium is in the water, but a high GH indicates a decent amount of calcium as that is one of the minerals that hardens water.

iamntbatman

That sounds like shell erosion to me.

It seems strange to have a shell erode in a pH higher than 7. However, a lack of calcium would definitely prohibit the snail's ability to grow properly, so it could be that you just don't have much calcium in the water so the shell wasn't growing as thick as would be ideal.

Honestly, I haven't even kept on top of my GH and KH since moving to my current residence. My pH is 7.2 and my snails do just fine with no supplements, so I must have enough calcium in the water for them. At my old apartment, my pH sat at around 6.8 and I started to get some shell erosion, so I started feeding them regular human calcium supplement pills. It's kind of hard to determine if the calcium was really dissolving in the water (I didn't have a kit for KH at the time) or if the snails were ingesting it by eating the pills (which they seemed to love) but either way it seemed to at least stem the tide of erosion until they were moved to water with a higher pH.