breeding snails for puffers

[ingo_1978]

I cannot find any lfs that'll sell me snails for my puffer. So I have decided that I will have to ask one of them if they find any in their tanks to keep them for me so I can breed them.

Before I do this, what do I need to breed them? Can I just stick them in a tub of water with some food? or does it need to be heated or aireated?

 

[jflowers]

A few weeks ago I got a pair of adult apple snails, no idea of sex. Less than a week after I got them, viola a big clutch of eggs 3" above water line (m and f then hehe), according to what i have read they should hatch soon so if you have a seperate tank, get a pair or more.

If you have a bad lfs locally, go and buy some plants from them, put them in a seperate tank and you should get millions of snails ( I have had infestations in this way that needed serious treatment to get rid of, clown loaches sorted it in the end)

Jon

 

[Fish00]

I'm atempting crab breeding as an alternative

 

[myenigmaself]

Get some "common snails" from your lfs. As jflowers said, they usually come with bundled plants. Set up a small tank, maybe 10G (5 is fine too) with a few feeder fish in there (feeder guppies do the trick). Make sure the tank is good and cycled (with maybe 20-30 fish in the 10G). Then remove half the fish and introduce the snails. You need to over-cycle the tank for optimal conditions, as the snails' population will explode and you'll [EDIT: end] up with a poluted tank if you don't do this. Occasionally you will get a rebound, where the bacteria don't have anything to eat so they die off and essentially un-cycle the tank. This can be offset by removing fish proportionally to the number of snails in the tank, but it's more work. Anyway, feed the fish normally (even over-feed them a little) and add spinnach. You'll have millions of snails in no-time.

 

[scarecrow]

That is exactly what I did (setup a snail breeding tank). Got a 2.5 gallon tank and a red sea nano filter. Usually lfs will give you the common snails because they are pests. We have a couple of guppies in the tank with the snails. Since the guppies were put in snail eggs are not really visable so I think they are eating them.

 

[Zombies]

This is how I breed snails, I got a critter keeper and just put in conditioned water a few common snails and lettuce. They lay eggs like crazy and I just move the eggs into another critter keeper and feed them when they hatch. Simple, I don't use a heater or a filter...

 

[ketyana]

You dont say which country you are in, I know in the UK that selling live fish to eat is illegal and I know I personally have not wished to cross the line to decide how far down the food chain this goes, ie you cant sell fish to feed other fish, but you can sell insects, so where do snails come etc I know alot of fish shops in the UK are therefore wary of this.

Say where abouts you are, who knows maybe someone close and give you a few to start with, I have found snails growing inside a bag that i had netted my fish out of and then re knoted and thrown in a bin in the living room, it only contained paper and this one bag odf water so it took me maybe 2 weeks to get around to throwing out for the bin men. so that was a basically no air polluted water bearly food environment so I would guess they are easy enough to work with

 

[appleblossom]

ketyana, you are right about not being able to sell live fish as food, but the law states that it is not necessarily insects that you can sell as food, but invertebrates.

Tham makes snails 100% legal as live food