mystery snail eggs

[guppler]

I was sprinkling flakes on my gold fish this morning and noticed that my silly golden mystery snail had crawled up onto the lid again. I get a little concerned when it does that because once it ended up all dried out on the floor for at least a day or 2 before i found it and dropped it back in. The way my external filter attatches it leaves enough space for the snail to escape and I haven't figured out how to fix the gap effectively.
Anyway as long as he stays in the tank I don't really mind him/her (both) being above the water line, but this time there was something different. apparently my snailhas laid a mass of eggs on the lid. it's a fairly large mass of litle white eggs in jelly like stuff. My mom was amazed at the bulk and wondered how the snail could have been hiding them all. I guess a single snail can fertilize itself, so I should have a bunch of baby mystery snails soon.
my pond snails always lay eggs below the water line, which makes sense because they are aquatic. I'm wondering if it's normal for mystery snails to lay eggs out of the water. maybe they drop in as they hatch?
Does anyone have experience/ knowedge of how this is suposed to work? Shold I leave the eggs alone and let them do their thing? Are they suposed to be wetter? will my goldfish eat them all? Should I remove the egg mass and put it someplace else?

 

[Bangin]

Leave them alone and they will hatch. They'll drop right into the water. It's perfectly normal for the eggs to be above the water line; that's how they do it.

You're going to have quite a mess of them, so prepare yourself.

 

[guppler]

Alrighty then.
I wonder how long it takes them to hatch and how many will grow up enough to transfer to other tanks or share or sell or be a good clean up crew. I expect they'l all be about the same color as their parent. i never had a dark green one. The gold matches my goldfish better.

 

[Bangin]

I've seen them produce 50-100 babies. What color mystery snails do you have now? I have the dark mystery snails, and the babies were all different colors. Some resembled their parents and others were golden! Their bodies were either dark(blackish) or light(peachy).

Here's a picture of one of mine.

You can check http/www.applesnail.net for more information.

 

[guppler]

Hmm..
I thought all gastropods were hermaphrodites. I might not actually get baby snails at all.

lots of good info on that site.

I only have the one snail and it seems she's a female. It's been long enough since i got her that I don't think those eggs can be fertile.

I think my goldfishes ate all their pond snails, but i'm not sure. I had put some into each tank, but at some point i noticed that there was only one relatively large active snail in the goldfish tank and I never saw eggs. It was a pretty active pond snail, always washign the windows. After it died I decided to replace it with a larger snail that the goldfish would be less likely to eat. (I don't know that they sucked it's guts out. It might have just died of old age and disintegrated, but i did find an empty shell.) I remembered seeing yellow or gold snails at an aquarium store and thought a collor to match th goldfish would be fun. They were labeled as Mystery snails where I got mine. They had dark and light ones and I think even the dark ones had tiny bright orange spots on their bodies, almost like little stars. I told them I wanted a gold one with orange spots on the body that hadn't been picked at by the crawdads that were ganging up on one poor snail and slowly eating it alive. maybe I sholud have rescued more from the crawdads, but I wasn't sure how happy they would be and at the time the goldfish were in a 10 g tank.
So anyway, My snail is has a fairly bright yellow shell and a pale body with those flourescent looking orange speckles. I was guessing those would be recesive colors, which would mean there would be no genes for darker colors, but Unless they can store stuff the way gupies do, I might not get any babies unless I go back and get more snails. I was thinking a dark one might be interesting for variety, but keeping all gold ones in the goldfish tank could be good too.

 

[Teelie]

Hmm..
I thought all gastropods were hermaphrodites. I might not actually get baby snails at all.

Nope... I have live bearing MTS, egg layers and single-sex snails. No herma's myself yet, unless Ramshorn are which I doubt. I might have some pond snails that are herm's though I'm not positive on them.

 

[guppler]

Yeah, I doubt many people have just one pond snail, and they crawl all over each other all the time, so you don't always know what's going on.
i'm wondering now if i should just let my prbably infertile snail eggs sit around long enough to find out for sure that they won't hatch.
The big snail has been acting a little different since she laid the eggs. She doesn't stretch out her siphon and feelers like she used to. I think she moves around less too. She was actually right next to the eggs when I first found them, but she dropped back in when I shut the lid. The fish do swim close to her a lot, which might make her shy, but it's wierd that she seems to have stopped extending as much right after laying eggs. Maybe i will try to find a boy for her just for fun. I don't know if it's possible to choose the gender when you buy them.
My snail also seems to be changing color a little. Her outer coils are paler. I don't know if that's normal or if it represents some change in health or nutrition or something. there is a distinct line about where the color changes and a slightly less distinct line a little further out. I wonder if those are signs of stress from changes in environment , like going to the store, or falling on the floor and drying out.

 

[guppler]

She's doing it again. This time she was trying to put eggs so close to the edge of the lid, tht she fell in as soon as i opened it and she took at least one egg down with her. Poor thing. I interupted her.

 

[guppler]

They hatched!
I was starting to wonder if the egg mass was starting to just rot away, but i thought ai saw some movement and a tiny snail-shaped lump near the mass, but not in it. i got flashlights and magnifying lenses and invited my Mom to come up and look at them. The goldfish seemed to be eating some, so i put a breeder box under the egg mass to intercept some on the way down and give them a little bettrer chance.
So far all appear to be light colored. i don't know if they will change as they mature. I also claeaned the filter and I think there was one light collored mystery snail in there, but i think the rest were pond snails that might have come with a plant. They were darker and looked more pointed, and some were significantly larger than the newborn mystery snails.
Oh, and I really need to do something about the gap around my filter. Mama snail escaped again. She didn't seem quite as dry this time, but i had to use a yard stick to roll her out from behind the aquarium stand.
There are still unhatched eggs and snails hanging in a cluster where the egg mass was, but they've been faling in all day already. They could have even started days ago, and i just didn't recognize what was happening at first.

 

[guppler]

She did it again!
When I woke up one morning ( this last weekend, but i forget exactly which day Suday?) Big Momma snail was in the play pen with her kids. I fed the fish and watched to be sure the big snail wasn't eating her own kids, and she didn't seem to be, so I left her alone.
The next time I opened the lid I noticed a cluster of eggs on the underside of the lid directly over the playpen. (breeding box that I put in to catch baby snails before fish ate them as they dropped from the first egg mass) Momma snail was back in the box with the kids, and we got some pictures of the kids crawling on her and of the egg mass right above. I don't know if they will turn out and I haven't tried to post photos yet, so i'm not sure if I can figure out how. (Mom's little 110 camera and a disposable) This most recent egg mass is at least as big as the first. Maybe bigger. The first one dropped over 80 tiny snails, and the second clutch (about 1/4 size of others) could be hatching any day now.
I'll have to call a couple of local pet stores and see if they buy mystery snails. So far the babies look almost colorless, but about 3/4 have a yellow tinge. I expect those to look a lot like Mom and the others to be "Ivory" based on what I've learned about genetics, but It's probably too early to really know. There were darker snails in the tank I bought her from.
I think when they get a little bigger, I'll move the babies to my comunity tank, so they can have more space without as much risk of being eaten. (Guppies and Danios at least have much smaller mouths than gold fish.) I might also have to use my bigger breeder box.
I drop broken bits of algae wafer in the play pen about once a day and they all gather around until it's about gone, then they spread out again.