SNAILS!?!?!

rocky00

so i left my tank for school for about 3 days, now there are loads of snails on my live plants!! there is about 15 little tiny snail babies on my annacharisses. when i cleaned them before i put them in my tank, i checked for snails and there was none.

i dont know the water status of my tank, i will go get it checked at petsmart tommorow.

are they bad for my tank?

should i get rid of them? or should i leave them alone?


Thank You.

Lupin

Hi Rocky.

Live plants(regardless of where you buy them) often harbor snail eggs and baby snails which remain invisible due to their pinhead size. I am under the impression these are pond snails which are quite annoying once they explode in populations. Try removing them manually or use lettuce weighed down with a stone. Let it stay overnight and you can throw that away in the next day once you see snails crawling over the lettuce.

Try to minimize your feeding rations to the fish. Abundance of food only will allow the snails to reproduce at an amazing rate.

Try to get your own test kit instead of relying to your lfs.:) API Freshwater Master test kit is best recommended. I know for some reason that most lfs will lie to you saying 'water is fine' when there is actually something wrong with the results.

rocky00

i will definitely look into that.


thanks for the help!

daisycutter

depends on the species ive begun breeding red ramshorns that came as hitchers as they have proved very usefull to the tank they eat every tiny scap of alge and dont touch the plants

Blue_Frog

I had a problem with the round red shell ones before i got the clown loaches - and they cleaned them all out of the 95gal tank (they hitched in with plants, and ended up in both my tanks).

Now i just keep taking the snails out of the little 10 gal tank (using the lettuce method Blue mentioned) and give them to the loaches as treats - its the funniest thing watching them swim around holding the snailshell in their mouth as they try to get the snail out :D