When Snails Attack

[Max Action]

I have 4 snails - 3 apple/mystery snails (two black one yellow), and one Ramshorn.

I'm not going to go into a bunch of details at this late hour, but for now I'll say that on two occasions, while watching by homemade moonlight, I've witnessed the yellow snail literally hunting down and ATTACKING other snails (once the ramshorn, once another black apple snail). It looks pretty brutal, actually, and not even taking them out of the water briefly or dropping an algae pellet next to them breaks it up. That yellow guy doesn't stop kicking ass until he's good and ready.

NOW I know why he's gotten so much larger and so much more active, and also, perhaps, why one of the black snails (the one I saw attacked tonight) seems unable to grow his shell properly in one spot ...

 

[Teelie]

Strange. I have a Gold, a much smaller plain Apple, a smallish Ramshorn and countless Malaysians and I've never seen the Gold go after any of them and it's had it's chance to get the smaller Apple. It could literally eat it whole but mostly ignores it. It will eat the algae pellets and "hide" it from the fish however.

 

[the_Jman]

Without meaning to sound 'stupid' are you sure teh snail wasnt trying to mate lol
How did the snails attack each other ? if one of teh snails crawled onto teh other one then they might have been mating. i wonder wot its like witnessing snails fight.... it must be rather slow lol i heard snails mating can take up to 3 hours lol

 

[Sassy]

Apple Snails are quickly becoming my favorite thing in my tank. I have two gold incas, two black mysteries, a red apple and a baby apple. We call our largest gold Chester the Molester because he hunts down the others and 'slimes' them.
I bought the red one from my betta tank but from the start that snail didn't seem right. It moved way too slow (even for a snail), wasn't eating, and seemed a bit in shock.
Just because it felt like the right thing to do I moved it to the big tank with the other five and within 20 minutes Chester hunted Red down. Chester climbed on topof Red while it was sleeping and literally lifted it's shell up and stuck his face inside and just rooted around and touched Red everywhere. Red showed an instant improvement after that.
After that I went to the library and did some reading on snails in general (not just aquatic snails) and found that that snails are extremely 'touchy-feely'. They don't just do it for procreation either.

Chester is almost 1/3 bigger then the other gold (named Scar Face because he went for a walk out of the tank and cracked his shell) and twice as big as the two blacks. But in all my pet-store-snail-watchings I've always noticed that gold incas are larger then black mysteries.

All five of my adults have slightly askewed shells.

 

[Donya]

Without meaning to sound 'stupid' are you sure teh snail wasnt trying to mate lol
How did the snails attack each other ? if one of teh snails crawled onto teh other one then they might have been mating. i wonder wot its like witnessing snails fight.... it must be rather slow lol i heard snails mating can take up to 3 hours lol

I havn't seen much agression in most apple snails, but I've seen it pretty frequently between male giant ramshorns (Marisa cornaurietis). They can damage each other's shells from it and they bite at each other too; they move faster than you might think. If one snail is on the shell of another, specifically the right side, then it is most likely mating behavior.