Mysterious Mass Snail Death?

[AshleySpatula]

i have a 20g and i had one ivory and one blue mystery snail and a number of ramshorns. then i got two dark purple brigs and four light purple brigs in the mail and acclimated them as i would any fish and for the first couple weeks they were fine. then within a two week period almost all of them died. they were all about pea sized when i got them. even my ivory and blue who i had for a couple months and were no where near adult size (bout halfway there) i only have a few ramshorns left and i have been seeing alot more MTS.
what happened?

my fish at the time were four black neons, four zebra danios, four rosey minnows, and a female betta. none of them seemed to have any problems at that time.
i have one dark purple left and he has gotten bigger since then.

what can i do to assure i keep him alive and healthy?

 

[severum boy]

There can only really be three solutions to what happened.
1. Not enough food for the snails. They will not eat algea to survive, they need feeding from you.
2. Some sort of gastropod only disease which could have wiped them out.
3. Water not clean enough. How often do you do water changes?

 

[ollyhtafc]

There could be copper in the tank if you treated any disease or algae recently?

I came home to find my minnows throwing around a baby snail shell the other day.I was looking forward to watching that little guy grow too.

 

[Nim]

Snails do need reguler food. I have noticed that feeding them only cucumber is also not enough. They need some protien based foods so I feed them a mix of catfish pellets and cucumber and peas.

Apple snails also cannot tolerate ammonia very well and such small ones may be very susceptible.

I also assume you have the tank heated as they wont survive the winters whereas MTS and pest snails are surviving in a spare tank even in frost

Copper could be another culprit. Even dropping a 1P coin in the tank can have disasterous effect to snails.

Nim
ps: not a snail expert but have some experince of breeding and keeping them for a few years