Snails In Planted Tank

[james_fish]

Will Pomacea bridgesii be okay in my tank or will they eat plants?

Any other suggestions must be okay with my stocking list found in my signature and be from South America.

Much appreciated

James.

 

[ian]

I had one in a planted tank for a while until it died. It never touched my plants. I have also read that they can oftern die of starvation, rather than eating plants.

 

[james_fish]

I had one in a planted tank for a while until it died. It never touched my plants. I have also read that they can oftern die of starvation, rather than eating plants.

Hmmm, interesting. I think I might try 2 or 3 in my tank. There is a certain amount of algae in the tank, especially on the back wall and behind the filter out of sight.

Oh well, can only try I suppose. Might post a 'wanted' on the classified section, see if I can get some decent sized one's.

James.

 

[JoshuaA]

I had one in a planted tank for a while until it died. It never touched my plants. I have also read that they can oftern die of starvation, rather than eating plants.

Hmmm, interesting. I think I might try 2 or 3 in my tank. There is a certain amount of algae in the tank, especially on the back wall and behind the filter out of sight.

Oh well, can only try I suppose. Might post a 'wanted' on the classified section, see if I can get some decent sized one's.

James.

Snails eat a lot of unseen algae and micro-organisms on the glass, you can often see most snails licking the glass with their rasp like tongue. I started off with two at one point then one died within a week, it's friend lived for another 3 months until I put two more in to make it look a bit more natural than just one on his own.

I have found that if you do clean the glass a little too vigorously the snails are never cleaning it with their tongues as I imagine there is little left on the glass for them to eat. It is recommended that you have an established tank for them to go into due to the food source, I have never fed my snails any actual food. They refuse to eat live or rotting plant matter and even if I boil some vegetables for them they are not interested at all.

I did however unfortunately have a fish die in the space of 2 days (Not sure when as I was away) when I came back I noticed all 3 snails huddle on-top of something and they were actually eating away at the fish corpse. Sad but then again most fish do and so I imagine snails do also, looked like they had a right feast however as the rest of the fish looked immaculate I imagine it had only been dead for a few hours.

Not much to go wrong with these, you can feed them specific food but it's probably not worth it, they crap a lot so if you have a light substrate for example play sand you are going to be seeing a lot of black pellets on the floor where they poop. They move so fast as well within a few hours of a water change it can look like the tank was never cleaned. However they are quite fascinating little creatures.

 

[james_fish]

Thankyou for the input

James.

 

[dipsydoodlenoodle]

I think they might have the odd bite of plant but on the whole provided you give them additional food they should be fine