Dr. Tanks #7 Snail Remover

[gimme30]

Until the beginning of this year I never made a serious effort to keep live plants. My first attempt years ago was a complete failure-this was when they sold by the cents, not dollars. Aquascaping wasn't even a word.
No biggie, I don't have a problem with plastic plants and my tanks never looked like Bozo the clown trying to fit into a drag convention.
But I can appreciate their benefits to livestock so I decided to try them again.

So, along with algae I've never had to deal with before, now I've got pest snails. This isn't my first rodeo with the little nasties. I've purposely introduced them to tanks whose inhabitants viewed them as tasty slime covered treats.
But I'm not keeping anything that eats them now and I absolutely despise them, so I've been on a mission to eradicate every last one. A seek and destroy, but without the RPGs, sort of mission.

I may have found my RPG. Unfortunately it came from a place I refuse to do business with due to their unethical practices but it was the only place I could find it and, like I said, I'm on a mission.
It comes in tablet form and is administered over a 3-day period. It claims to be fish, plant, and shrimp safe, and while the ingredients are vague (50mg snail paralysis agent, 180mg snail stimulate agent, no copper) I can confirm no fish or shrimp deaths as of today.
The plants? Hard to tell as dying is their normal state of being. It hasn't accelerated at least.

Now this may change, as the instructions state to do a 50% water change after treatment, which I completely ignored on purpose. #1 if it's safe, then why bother. #2 if it works, then mo' is betta'. The instructions also state that it will take care of 90% of them which I'd rate conservative as there are very few left. But as we all know, for snails, one means LEGION. You're supposed to do another treatment the following week to take care of any newly hatched snails and I am doing exactly that today.

It's really too early to make a definitive judgement but so far #7 has lived up to it's claims.

 

[gimme30]

I was going to wait until next Wednesday to update as that would have been a full 3 weeks for my little test but I don't think it's necessary to wait that long. Besides what else am I going to do at 2 am on a Sunday morning?

Not that, apparently, anyone cares. Must be a bunch of snail lovers here.

I still have not done a water change on either of the treated tanks meaning they are essentially overdosed, with absolutely no ill effects on anything, plants fish or shrimp. And, unless they're hiding, I am completely snail free. I can't say how this might work with other types of snails since all I had were bladder snails, but it did kill a nerite I'd forgotten was in there. I have no way to test the actual composition of the water but the usual parameters and TDS remain the same. I also don't have any particularly delicate plants so I can't say if something like crypts would be affected.

This is going to be a HUGE boon to me. I've killed off a bunch of plants before they've even entered the tank doing a bleach dip, and certain varieties don't survive the reverse respiration trick either. Which doesn't always work anyway since the little buggers crawl out of the water. Now I can skip quarantine entirely, toss in a few tabs, and let the plants commit suicide in their usual way.

 

[GaryE]

I'm always a bit leery of poisons, especially when I don't know that they are. I understand secret ingredients from a business side but the aquarium industry is unregulated in many countries, and as far as remedies go anything goes. If it kills one thing what else does it do? Snails are fairly complex animals and I wonder what these chemicals actually are.

I hate snails, and if I could temporarily shrink myself and go into the tanks with a mace and an axe, I'd show no mercy. I have no love of shelled snot monsters. But toxins in a tank don't have to kill quickly to do harm.

 

[gimme30]

Yeah, not a huge fan of chemicals of any kind myself, especially when actual ingredients aren't listed. In all these years I've never encountered any problem that couldn't be fixed with a simple water change but this was getting out of hand. None of the usual tricks were working-I don't overfeed, dead leaves get pulled on sight and I don't allow detritus build-up. You could say my tanks are clinically sterile, a look I prefer but I realize isn't ideal for shrimp. But I was pulling >50 a day by hand and seriously, who has that kind of time? Not to mention having to pull the impellors on filters when they start making that satisfying "crunching" sound.

I've jumped out of perfectly good airplanes and lived in a pressurized tube underwater, and I ride a motorcycle in a town where people can't drive without staring at their cell phones, so this didn't seem like a huge risk to take. And I don't feel comfortable endorsing this stuff 100% just yet. As you say, problems may arise down the road. I'm keeping a close eye on things and will (try to remember) to update weekly.

It does seem too good to be true, and it may very well be. I'm hoping this will turn out to be the silver bullet snail haters are looking for and am willing to take one for the team to find out.

 

[Magnum Man]

I have one tank, that I just can't seem to control them... I even tried a small group of assassins ( I think they ate themselves to death, with out even making a dent in the bladder snail population )... but I don't even add fertilizer to my tanks, as I want them to be all about the fish.... so any plants need to work with the fish waste, and any nutrients in the water... I think Dr. Tim's is a good brand, ( sorry, I saw later, that is Dr. Tanks, not Dr. Tim's ) they have many followers with their instant tank cycle bacteria, so I suspect it's a quality product... I've just had to learn to deal with the snails in my problem tank... I just put the fish on a diet, and suck out as many as I can...

 

[GaryE]

To me, for aquariums the only good snail is a ...isn't. Even dead snails pollute a tank easily.

Where I live, in summer we have a land snail problem, as an invasive snail has become established. They are "European corpse snails", a lovely name entirely unconnected to my living across the road from a graveyard. They have few enemies yet, so they hit populations where a nice walk on a post sundown summer's evening has a crunching sound. Pond snails in tanks, corpse snails on the ground - it's enough to make a guy like garden slugs.

You can call me a snail hater but before every water change, I look at all the pond snails on the glass, and have a sort of crush thing going.

Done regularly (and I don't like it) I've eliminated them from a number of tanks. What's almost as bad is Malaysian Burrowing snails, which live and die mostly in the gravel, polluting tanks badly as they croak.

In Christian mythology, snails symbolize passing evil and transient wickedness, and I can get behind that symbolism. If I trusted a snail killing product, I'd use it. But this, I don't trust.

 

[gimme30]

I'm not sure if it's still made but you may have heard of Had-A-Snail. I know I've got a bottle of it lying around here somewhere but there's not much chance of me finding it. At least this century anyway. Pretty sure it was nothing more than a copper-based solution and it works great-in a tank without plants or inverts. A couple of drops, a couple of days....then a week of vacuuming out dead snails. Dr Tanks doesn't work as quickly, or eradicate them completely, at least on the first treatment.

I'm naturally skeptical so I don't really trust it myself even with the promising results so far. Of course it's made in China, so there's that. And the fact that they've got products for other uses all numbered like they're trying to ride Dr Tims' coattails. Pretty shifty in my book.

I don't have anything that's irreplaceable in either tank at the moment. Normally I wouldn't have taken the chance and just wrote it off as another snake oil. But technology marches on, and I figured while we may never get flying cars surely SOMEONE could figure out how to safely eradicate snails!

I'll keep you guys updated.

Edited to add: I still haven't changed the water. I can skip this for probably another week or two until nitrates get higher than I'd like. The idea is I want to keep whatever is in this stuff in the tank at elevated levels longer than required to force some sort of reaction, good or bad.

 

[gimme30]

@GaryE This one's for you. I have no idea what they're called but they crawl out of my rosebushes regularly. This fella was around 4"/8cm long before squishing. He was much longer after.

 

[f_luxus]

Soft water and CO2 doesn't kill all snails, but i t will reduce it, and also make your plants grow better and stronger.

 

[gimme30]

I didn't know that about Co2. Being a very low-tech, low maintenance kind of guy, could I get the same effect with a couple pumps pushing a bunch of air stones? Unfortunately we have very hard water here. Back when I had a room full of tanks I'd go to the trouble of softening it for breeding species that needed it, but these days, as far as plants go anyway, I've just learned to embrace the decay.

 

[GaryE]

I have very soft water from the tap, and that has cut down on the pond and ramshorn snails. The worst snails, the Malaysian burrowers, seem to maintain steady populations in it. But I feed a lot of live foods, and the fish don't share. That also helps.

I would water change with the product, simply because if there has been any level of testing for long term toxicity found, they'll have covered with the instructions. In my youth I had a girlfriend whose family home was right beside an asbestos mine, and when I visited her parents, she and I walked hand in hand across fibrous rocks and skipped "funny" white furred rocks across the lake. Everyone there had heartbreaking coughs. I was there for a weekend and so far so good, but a couple of months there would have shortened my retirement. How long your fish are exposed might matter, if not to you, to them.

 

[gimme30]

Well now you've got me feeling guilty. Darn that common sense.
Actually in thinking about it I agree with you completely and both tanks will get big changes tonight after work. I haven't seen any of the usual signs of distress, there's a new batch of baby shrimp this morning that appear to be fine, and I just scooped out another batch of eggs from my perpetually horny CPDs. (I had NO idea they would be like this)
Those eggs are going to stay in the treated water though.....I can't completely deny the mad scientist in me!

I've contacted the supplier in the hope they'll be able to provide a little more clarity into just what exactly I'm dealing with but I suspect they won't be able to tell me, or won't want to be bothered tracking down what I'm looking for. Which really amounts to nothing more than a list of ingredients.

 

[gimme30]

Ooops! Wednesday came and went and I forgot to update.
Not much to report really, all the captive critters and plants are fine. The eggs kept in the treated water have hatched and joined their brothers and sisters in the grow out tank.
Still snail-free but as expected, no word yet on what's actually in this stuff.

 

[Magnum Man]

no 5 legged frogs???

 

[gimme30]

Lol no but if I stick one on my forehead it looks like I've got a third eye!