Sudden snail death

[Narideth]

As some of my previous posts have mentioned, I'm trying to raise and breed mystery snails. Well, I just found out this morning that one of them died without any cause that I can tell. I did mix a new food for them, but now I'm having a hard time remembering if I ever saw him come out to eat it, and it's a serious hit with my other snails (Especially the ramshorns).

I've been monitoring the parameters in my tank quite closely, and things have been looking good. I even checked the PH, which I don't usually worry too much with since I know my tap water is a good PH/hardness for snails. Everything came back in the green, 0 ammonia, 0 nitrite, approx 5ppm nitrates, PH around 7.5 - a little lower than I want but not something that should have killed the little guy.

I saw that he was in the back of the tank unmoving and was just giving him time to decide to come back out and this morning I saw his shell door was completely detached, so he's been gone for a couple of days.

I'm really starting to think this line of snails has very, very poor genetics. I received three all the same pea-size, and of the three now, one of them has yet to grow larger than a small marble and may be on his way out too, the two large ones developed cleft shells, and one one of the large guys has passed, all in the span of about two months. Keeping in mind that I have been successful in keeping not only neocaridina shrimp, but ramshorns and rabbit snails in the same tank, healthy and happy.

Is there anything else that could have caused this? My foods are snail safe, I haven't seen any evidence of parasites and the tank seems healthy. I'm at a loss for what could have happened.

 

[PheonixKingZ]

What do you feed them? Do you dose any fertilizers?

 

[Narideth]

No fertilizers, the food is a sort of random rotation of tetra pro pleco algae wafers, and hikari crab cuisine.

The newest food is more or less the same snello recipe I see everywhere with unflavored/unsweetend gelatin, organic baby food (only greens, no meats) food grade calcium carbonate and spirulina. They only get that about twice a week, and like I said, I don't think I saw the big guy come out to even eat that since I only started feeding that about a week and a half ago.

 

[seangee]

Are the other snails and shrimps still in the tank? If so I suspect that you have either been unlucky or, as you suggest, received a "bad" batch. Anything in the water or food would have taken out the neos long before the snails.

 

[Narideth]

Yep, I have a super healthy colony of blue neocaridina living in the same tank as well as the remains of a blue spotted ramshorn colony (I'm slowly transitioning them to another tank to make space for the mystery snails so the bio load won't get too high.) My rabbit snails are there too, since the tank is mildly heated (around 78 degrees).

It's such a bummer, but I have a new batch of mystery snails coming in today from a different breeder, so fingers crossed they have a better line. The breeder claims the line is clean, so, we'll have to see.