Snails

[fishfreak24]

Hey I have seen little baby snails in my tank where are they coming from and should I be woried?
Thanks

 

[fatheadminnow]

Have you bought any live plants lately?

Then can get out of control pretty quick.

It all depends if you want them or not.

-FHM

 

[drobbyb]

Usually rapidly multiplying snails are a sign that you are overfeeding. If there is no extra food, then there are no extra snails.

 

[Tory]

Hey I have seen little baby snails in my tank where are they coming from and should I be woried?
Thanks

agreed with the two other comments. I bought plants for a tank, and in time, I noticed 1 snail - me and my other half used to take great pleasure in trying to spot it as although large, was the same colour as the gravel! After a trip to the LFS, the guy said "oh yeah, if youve got one, youve got hundreds"...there was me thinking yeah yeah, I really have only got one!! 3 days following my visit to the LFS, I did a water change and good gravel vac..moved a piece of bog wood and my god!!! There WERE hundrends of the little blighters hiding under the wood! Bad times for me though, after moving the wood, I disturbed them and they were all over the tank, I think you can safely say I had an infestation!! I tried something I had seen suggested - weigh down a lettuce leaf, and by the morning, you should be able to lift loads out and sling em in the garden...oh no, I came back to the lettuce leaf in the morning, and there was hardly any left!! Infestation over now, I bought a couple of loaches, and they sorted the problem out within a week - they made a right feast out of them!!

Routes in can include on plants that you have purchaced, or even fish - I bought some fish last week and noticed there were a few hitchikers in the bag!!

As for the snails (if you are unaware), they can quickly populate as alot are hermaphrodites so they can and will reproduce singularly. I for example have got trumpet snails in there, but they usually live just under the substrate eating debris like leftover food. As well as being a pain, they can also benefit the tank, as mentionned they eat debris under the substrate, but because they are also moving alot, they are also shuffling the substrate around a bit.

If you are wanting to get rid of them, loaches as I mentionned earlier can make a fine feast of them inc. Clown Loaches (if you have the space), Khuli Loaches, YoYo/Pakistani Loaches are fun to watch too. Depending on if the tank is occupied already or not, dwarf puffers are molluscivores and LOVE snails !

 

[kelly528]

I got a couple of hitchhiker pnd snails on some plants. There are tons of egg sacs around the tank at any given time, but the population has never gotten out of control. They will eat some species of plants, but not most. I decided to let them stay. I feed any extra babies to my other fish and would like to get a dwarf puffer sometime so they are here to stay

 

[BigIan]

i had a snail problem and chain loaches are great they don`t get to big nd devour the snails,