Snails predators - which one ?

Hi Guys,

I have a nice rice fish display tank that is heavily planted (very new to the planted side) I have noticed the odd snail popping up all plants are quarantined for 2 weeks which doesn’t seem to be enough. Look for a long term solution to remove the snails . I have one bristle nose plecos (only 6 months) and 12 rice fish (ideally nothing that will eat eggs but can remove at breeding time if needed ) . Is there any types of fish that will take care of the snails and not nip/harm existing livestock or eat all the plants ?

I am not a snail fan but if an assassin will keep the other snails at bay then it will have to be - do they reproduce heavily like the others ?

The tank is around 80 litres of free space (when accounting for the space take up by plants and structure etc - typically a water temperature of 26 C ) . Fine gravel substrate on top .

Thanks in advance

If you want a creature to remove snails, the only option in an 80 litre tank is assassin snails. Snail eating fish need a bigger tank.

The snail numbers can be kept under control by restricting their food. This means not over feeding the fish (fish need a lot less food than you'd think) and regular tank cleaning to remove uneaten food and any bits of dead plant. I have two types of pest snail in both my tanks but they are not a problem as I don't over feed.

I started with 15 assassin snails many years ago to deal with pond snails. Since hen I have sold or given away a few 100 assassins and I probable have another 150 spread across a number of tanks. I almost always bring 2 bags with 13 (a bakers dozen) snails in each to my fish club meetings for the auction at the end of the meeting.

The tanks where I have no pest snails is because they were taken care of by the fish in those tanks. For me this was two species- clown loach and sidthimunki loach/ The first get big and when they do they have trouble with smaller snails as far as i am concerned, They suck the snail out of its shell. As my clowns got bigger I worried that they would end up inhaling the snail and shell with its edges. But they basically wiped out any snails before they got that big. They age the bigger snails and basically stopped reproduction.

The sidthimunki is one of the smallest loaches- aka dwarf chain. They cannot eat the bigger snails but they go to town on the smaller ones. They eliminated all the snails in the tank because the babies never reached sexual maturing and the bigger ones died a normal death from old age.

Assassins are live bearers and the babies go into the substrate to grow and avoid predators. The adults like to go underground as well.

They were piling on Hikari ALgae wafers.