Snail Explosion

[rdd1952]

I have become absolutely overrun with tiny trumpet snails. At least I think that's what they are. They are the cone shaped kind. Someone said that a snail explosion was generally a sign of overfeeding which I'm sure is my problem but now the bigger problem is getting rid of them. There are so many and they are so small that picking them out by hand is impossible.

I took my net yesterday and scooped up some sand and shook it out to see what I had. I bet in a double tablespoonful of sand I had at least 50 of these tiny snails. I did this about 3 times hand had well over 100 snails. Some were the larger ones (about 3/4" long) but most were just the tiny ones (less than 1/4", some less than an 1/8"). And this is a 29 gallon tank so I can only imagine how many are in there.

I know that the trumpet snails are good for sand because they bore and keep it from compacting and keep dangerous gases from building. But I've got to do something. I'm afraid my water conditions are going to start deteriorating to the point that my filtration can't keep up.

I am fully stocked but am considering getting 3 smallish loaches to start eating them. I could probably move them over to my 75 gallon after they clean up the mess in the 29 gallon. I don't want to buy fish and plan on returning them because I know that once they are in my tanks, they're my pets and I won't take them back. Any suggestions on which direction to go? I guess as a last resort I could break the tank down and change the sand. I would like to have black sand in that tank but just don't want the hassle of changing and possibly stressing my fish and shrimp and losing some.

 

[jimbooo]

i've always had trumpet snails and actually add them to any new tanks i get. however i'm not over run with them, can normally see 3/4 on the surface during the day, 20/30 at night.

they breed according to the available food in the tank. if your over feeding this will be a direct factor. i guess your not overfeeding as you already know this. (a build up of crud on the sand also counts as snail food.

if i were you i would do a thorough gravel/sand vac and dont feed the fish for 5 days. the fish will be fine for it (it will take at least a month, often 2 for the fish to suffer).

the snails will eat all the available food then run out. at which point they will stop multiplying.

only feed very small ammounts of food from then on. ideally if you feed once a day cut that in half and feed that ammount twice a day. the fish will then eat every last scrap of food leaving nothing for the snails.

 

[rdd1952]

I'm sure the excess food started the problem. With 5 corys and 7 shrimp, I wanted to make sure enough food got to the bottom for them. I didn't feed this morning and will skip a few more days. I did a water change last night but since the tank is moderately planted, doing a total gravel vac is almost impossible as I can't get to some parts of the tank. It would be nice if some of the snails would vacuum up too but unfortunately they are just heavy enough that it won't suck them all the way down.

 

[Rodders]

I had that problem, a couple of clown loaches ate the lot up in no time. Now im snail free!!

 

[Bloo]

I hate trumpet snails so much I almost have a fear of them
I rarely use the word "hate" but I think it's the fear of something that can turn uncontrollable that I hate more than the actual snails.

Anyway, I've had to deal with this problem myself in the past - usually when I've added plants to the tank and by the time I've noticed (in pea gravel) it's muuuuuch too late to do a "quick fix".

But what I've done in the past is literally pick them out by hand. Sometimes I'd spend an hour handpicking the largest snails off every night. After a few weeks I was rid of them.

Quite recently I also had some introduced with some plants but this time in my sand tank. By the time I noticed, they were happily burrowing away !

So this is what I started doing :

Siphoning out parts of the sections of the sand and then washing it with boiling water mwhahahahaha

If you then have time, you can also sift it out with a flour sieve. If you do that 3 times a week over the next couple of weeks (just say 20% of the sand at a time) I'm pretty sure you'll get rid of them.

Good luck.

 

[rdd1952]

I really want to change my play sand over to the black tahitian moon sand. i love the look of black sand. This may be the time to do it. The only thing I worry about is stressing the fish and shrimp too much. Actually, I worry more about the shrimp than the fish. I've got a 16 gallon tub I used to soak driftwood. I'm sure I could move everything over to it while I made the change.

Bloozoo, you're in the same boat as me. I know the trumpet snails are a valuable item in a tank with sand but I just don't like snails. The strange thing with these is that I don't know where they came from. I put plants in the tank back in April and haven't even noticed them until the last month.