Snails

[rfisher]

Hi All,

I am not sure if this is the right place for this post, so I apologise if it isn't the right place.

I purchased some real plants at the weekend from my local Pet shop. Got them home and rinsed them off with some water from the tank and then proceeded to pant them. I was told to rinse them by the pet shop owner just to make sure that they were free of snails. However I noticed last night whilst I was doing some water tests, a couple of snails. They were small and flat and reddish/Brown in colour. I removed them just in case they were bad news.

My question is are they bad news or not?

Regards,

Rfisher.

 

[catxx]

sounds like they may have been ramshorns. good algae eaters, make babies like rabbits! i started with 1, now i have 60+ and the babies have started making their own babies, but managed to seperate them from the main tank.

i think they're quite interesting to watch, they're fast little snails. i use them in my tanks to munch algae (if my bettas leave them alone anyway, they like to pick them up and throw them around the tank )

 

[4ftguppy]

Snails have plus and minus sides - whether they are desiraeable is largely dependent on the type of tank set-up you have


in favour:

clean up algae and dead leaves, if you overfeed or a fish dies that you didn't spot, they will happily clean up that too. Snails are essential in fry tanks where you are deliberately overfeeding and need a good clean up. Apple snails aree good for this. Malaysian trumpet snails can keep your substrate aerated

against:

snails can eat your plants like a crisp salad; they don't touch certain plants (my tanks of hornwort, java fern, java moss, anubias are untouched) but some plants like indian fern get eaten almost immediately.
Snails breed quickly and before you know it there are hundreds ADDING to the bioload of your tank. If this happens you probably overfeed your fish.
They do eat fish eggs (not so good if you are a breeder) especially the small rounded ones - ramshorns (spiral shell) don't seem so bad, and apple snails are just too big to find many

Snails will also move from tank to tank if side by side, spreading disease - Keep a physical distance between quarantine tank and any stock tank

Whether they look good/bad or are interesting/boring is largely up to you - I personally don't care either way about ramshorns, but will remove the 'pond' style snails immediately

I keep a small snail population in all my tanks