Apple Snails

[sussexgirl]

Heard a few of you mentioning apple snails recently and want to know whether they're beneficial to have in your aquarium and if so what do they do? No puns about putting on entertainment shows for the fish thank you!

 

[Tokis-Phoenix]

I have a really large apple snail in my fry tank, it does help with eating algae and keeping the plants clean to a certain extent, but other than that its just a general inhabitant of the tank.
They are generally slow and can be prone to malnutrition in shell development when kept with bottom dwelling fish that are competetive for food, so i would not advise keeping cories or plecs with apple snails (i know this from experience, when i used to keep the snail in my main tank it hardly got a chance to eat with the cories and plecs around).
Currently my snail is just with some guppy and platy fry and 9 amano shrimp- the snail is thriving in this setup . I wouldn't advise relying on apple snails to survive purely on scavenging left over food, so if you do get one make sure you give it some algae wafers, catfish pelets/tablets and cucumber every now and then.
Adding mineral/vitamin supliments to the water or on the food can also help, as many apple snails sold at lfs tend to have poor shell development and can often randomly die shortly after purchase or weeks down the line (if your snail spends much time hiding in its shell or floating around the tank this is a bad sign).

Also, on a another note, as with all critters like molluscs or crustations, they can easily be killed by copper based meds, so if you do not have a spare quarentine or hospital tank for treating fish in or moving the snail/s into when you treat you tank, you should also take this factor into consideration as well (even if your fish are currently healthy, you should never rule out these things in the future) .