Nerite Snail Acting Sluggish

[turtlegirl]

I bought 5 snails and put them in my quarantine tank, 4 of them are doing fabulous and 1 is not. It doesn't move anywhere near as much as the others Is it stressed because I just bought it or..?

 

[Donya]

Particularly if the snails were shipped recently, a day or two of sluggishness is not uncommon. Snails can also be injured/overheated/etc. during shipping and experience complications that drag out over a couple of weeks. For example, if four do fine but one dies after a week, it could very easily be that the one snail was not well when you got it. Sometimes something as simple as a store employee yanking a snail off the side of the glass too fast to put it in a bag can cause injury and result in a snail that seems ill and inactive. However, particularly since you mention this is a QT tank and haven't said how long these snails have been in the tank, there is something important to ask: have any fish medications been used in this quarantine tank's history? Individual snails do not always react to environmental problems at the same rate.

 

[turtlegirl]

They've been there since Tuesday. And no, no meds ever

 

[Donya]

Hmmm...almost a week is a bit long just for usual stress from the ride home and introduction into the tank. Keep an eye on the snail. As long as the others are doing alright and eating well, there's probably not much to do. Is the inactive snail able to hang onto the glass or is it sitting closed up or partially extended? If it is on the glass and just sleeps a lot, it may be fine and perhaps just isn't very hungry. If it tends to sit partially closed up, particularly its response time seems slow relative to the other snails, then it is probably in bad shape from a shipping mishap or mishandling at the store.

 

[turtlegirl]

He goes up on the glass. I think he's been moving a bit more now

How long do you recommend I quarantine snails? 2 weeks like fish??

 

[Donya]

Usually there is no need to QT snails in the traditional sense, since the only well-documented things that they can carry are either obvious (external parasites like leeches) or are internal parasites that can lie dormant for months (mostly flukes - which I have only ever encountered with wild caught Ampullariids, never Nerites, so I would say you are safe there) and are also incredibly rare in the trade.

As far as I have seen in my years of looking for information on the topic, there are really no well-documented viral/bacterial or protozoan parasite diseases known to be communicable between snails, and none similarly there are no such documented microbial diseases that would be passed to fish. I would also extend that to say that there aren't even sufficient hobby-level anecdotes to suggest any such illnesses being a risk in the trade to date. So, what you are really QTing would be any bits of water from the store bag that got into the QT tank rather than the animals themselves. Making sure that the snails get a good wash in new water (they have to open up to let the old water out of the mantle cavity) several times is usually sufficient to avoid water contamination if the snails came from a tank with waterborne fish illnesses. Since your snails are in a QT tank, you have basically already done that. If the tank the snails came from was full of something like ich, then you might want to continue to QT for the sake of QTing the water, although usually washing snails in clean water and giving them a chance to flush their mantle cavities with new water is plenty to avoid transferring even something nasty like ich. The free-swimming stages of that only last a couple of days max as far as I've read, so you are well over that. The only other reason I could see to continue to QT would be if you are still waiting for a return to normal behavior in the one sluggish individual, since stressed snails can easily get more stressed if picked on by curious fish.

Of course, all that's not to say there is anything wrong with QTing snails and other invertebrates. Going for the QT tank as a first choice with a new animal is always a responsible thing to do.

(Edited to fix typos)