Snails NEEDED!

[akos]

Good afternoon Beautiful People!

I need your expertise please!

Can anyone recomend any snails I could keep in either tropical or cold water tank, which breeds like crazy and hopefully would overrun the whole system? I have few pea puffers and they love to eat them, I wish to provide a variety of diet, not just bloodworms and mosquito larvaes.

your help is greatly appriciated!

 

[MattW]

Ramshorns, Bladder snails, and possibly Malaysian Trumpet Snails.

If you have a tank with just snails I would feed an algae wafer once a week to encourage breeding. Excess food is usually the cause of breeding in my experience. MDFishtanks keeps two groups of puffers and has a small aquarium filled to the brim of ramshorns which he feeds once a week as well. Getting the snails if you don't have any already is pretty easy. There is an abundance of eBay and Etsy sellers that sell them. Any LFS might also stock them as "puffer food". I have seen some feed puffers meal worms as well which they seem to devour as another food alternative.

 

[connorlindeman]

You will need a seperate tank for the snails. If you add the snails to the pea puffer tank, they will soon be gone. You will not be able to hold a steady population.

 

[Colin_T]

I was going to ask why the heck you would want snails. Then you mentioned food for puffers so I will let it go

Ramshorn and pond snails will live in cold or warm water and breed prolifically if well fed. I fed mine each day with a bit of flake or pellet food. have the light on for 16 hours a day to encourage algae (another food source for them).

Don't feed any new snails to the fish. Let them breed and feed the offspring to the fish. New snails could have parasites like worms and if the fish eat them, they get infected. Letting the snails breed for a couple of generations should give you clean snails free of parasites.

Do big water changes and gravel clean the substrate every week to keep the water clean.

If you have soft water (GH below 150ppm), add some mineral salts to increase the hardness so the snails don't have problems with their shells.

 

[MaloK]

In my region any LFS plants bought from any "public" tanks comes with BS (Bladder snails)

They are easy to keep and will proliferate with only strong light and filtration.

If you add a leaf litter to that, they will explode, Keep as soft water as you can and their shells will never become a problem.

 

[Ursula]

Malaysian trumpet snails, I went from 1 hitch hiker to thousands of the things.

 

[Colin_T]

Malaysian trumpet snails, I went from 1 hitch hiker to thousands of the things.

You can't control MTS snails. They are pure evil and not something you want in your tank.

 

[anewbie]

So - off topic but i think we should have a contest - who can eat the most snails; your puffers or my loaches

I'll pit my army against yours any day of the week. Gotta warn you my army is very large but to an extreme lack discipline or predictability

 

[Whitecloudminnowguy09]

Ramshorn!!!!

 

[gwand]

So - off topic but i think we should have a contest - who can eat the most snails; your puffers or my loaches

I'll pit my army against yours any day of the week. Gotta warn you my army is very large but to an extreme lack discipline or predictability

I bet on the French!

 

[anewbie]

I bet on the French!

Yea; a lot of folks bet on the french till the germans walked around the wall

 

[Ursula]

Yea; a lot of folks bet on the french till the germans walked around the wall

 

[GaryE]

This is like when you want green water, and nothing you do will make it thrive. Then, once the fry who needed it or all grown, or once the Daphnia have crashed, you get what you wanted and have a battle with the stuff.

You can get snails going out of control if you give yourself a few weeks to get the culture up and running. You need a good mineral content, a starter culture (I would use ramshorns over pond snails, just because) and food. I have a tank that had the usual occasionally spotted pest snails in it all along, but which now houses young Sturisoma - twig catfish. They get a heavy veggies based diet, and the snails are spreading like cults. Yesterday, I saw a baby catfish get shoved off a leaf by a pond snail.

It's just a matter of feeding an initial culture in an unshared tank, and harvesting.

 

[Bamf Comics]

I bought plants off E-Bay and ended up with at least two different types of snails so far as well as those pesky little flying critters. The bigger one's appear to be ramshorns or whatever you call them. Big rolled shells. Tiny little ones as well with a different shape. I've got colonies going in about 6 tanks heavily, 8 or so more just starting as well as the original tubs. One tank I feed heavily with Hikari bottom tabs to speed the growth so they get to sellable sizes faster. Drop a tab in, a while later theres a snail ball as a dozen or so swarm it into a big ball of feeding keeping the albino corys from having access.

 

[emeraldking]

I would also breed snails in a separate tank if I was you. Get a portion out of there to feed the puffer when needed. This way you can control the amount of snails much better then if the puffer and snails are in together.