Snails got in my tank - help

[accordztech]

Haha you guys are funny. I gave a solution for snails. Didn't care about shrimp. Calm down.

Tom has German blue rams and other fish that eat shrimp. They have shelter but not when he prunes, but he has so many...so Is that bad as well?

As I always say, I never trust anyone's opinion 100%. I always do the research to see if it suits me. Bad or poor advice or not....its only a suggestion.

[pmcarbrey]

Why willingly give advice that is bad for the setup in question? You're not being helpful at all. All you are doing is risking one day encountering someone who trusts you as being more experience, follows your advice, and potentially ruins the setup they have going for them. Bad advice is worse than no advice!

[PuddlesAqua]

It was bad advice for my specific set up, yes, and in that regard perhaps he shouldn't have said it. But all too often people on this forum and others blindly follow what random people tell them without doing any research or putting any actual thought into it. That's on them, not the advice giver.

Anyways, snails huh?

[shift]

I just gave my tank a good search and found 6 little pond snails... do most people take them out or just let them be?

[accordztech]

Originally Posted by PuddlesAqua

It was bad advice for my specific set up, yes, and in that regard perhaps he shouldn't have said it. But all too often people on this forum and others blindly follow what random people tell them without doing any research or putting any actual thought into it. That's on them, not the advice giver.

Anyways, snails huh?

well said. Well said. I never said I was right. Just an opinion.

[Sajacobs]

This thread really interests me. Two pond snails survived the bathing of the plants they were riding. I see lots of conflicting information about babies taking over a tank. So I picked them out and keeping them in a jar. I like the fact they eat algae and plant waste. But I don't want to be over run. So correct me if I'm wrong - they do not over take a tank unless over fed and provide an important eco balance to the tank. I have one tank with applesnails which is easy to control their eggs. But they are not the best clean up crew.

So people on this forum can find a balance with pond snails? And find its important part of a planted tank?

[Knotyoureality]

My assassin snails spend their time jet-setting from tank to tank. I like snails and have generally found it easy to keep populations in check, but occasionally I slip up or, as with my cherries, have a small tank that I want to keep snail free. That's where the assassins get called in.

My 3g shrimp tank had new substrate and I checked over the plants as I transfered them, but I knew I'd have hitchikers, so a couple assassins were fished out of the planted vase they'd been living in and dumped in. I spotted a few snails the first few days, but after a week the only critters in were the assassins. At which point I fished them out and dispatched one each to planted vases that'd gotten overrun thanks to my being a bit heavy-handed with the feeding and lax on cleaning. Now they're both living the good life in my 37g nibbling away at excess MTS with the third exiled to a 2.5g to chill--cause I don't want TOO much rambo-action in the 37g and I know they'll be more difficult to locate there so it'll take time to extract 'em.

One trick I've found with pond snails, is to concentrate on removing the small snails first. Repeated tests with hands-on experimentation has pretty much shown me that the drive to reproduce is strongest in the younger snails. Remove the occasional adult, but concentrate on taking out the bevy of young ones to keep them from reaching reproductive age. I suspect the older ones also help deplete resources---better ONE snail that's eating 70% of the available food and will only rarely lay eggs, than a herd of small snails each requiring much less food each who ALL lay eggs as often as possible. The only tanks/planted vases where I get a bunch of new young snails successfully hatching out and surviving are the ones where I purposefully remove all the largest/adult snails. Invariably I then get a population BOOM. Reverse that process and, even with lots of egg masses on the floaters, I go months without seeing a new hatching.

[Sluggo]

Just throwing this out here, somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but at a certain point overpopulations of certain things can become a self-perpetuating problem. I know this is so with algae, I suspect it might be so with snails:

Too much food source = large populations of snails. Too much snail reproduction = not enough food for the population. Not enough food = excess snails die off. Dead snails = ammonia, waste, food source. And so on, and so on.

If this is the case, the tank in question may have established a baseline of snail population that will not change significantly unless measures are taken to reduce the population that is already present. Does that make any sense?

I find that improving water quality by more doing frequent changes can help keep snail populations reasonable.

[MABJ]

With most snail shrimp combos, if a snail dies, the shrimp eats it. No ammonia that way.

So naturally reducing a population with good feeding practices isn't a problem.

One can manually remove snails is one doesn't like the number.

[shift]

So if i spotted 6 mini snails, (also have recent plants.. but only spotted 2 before).. does this mean i am over feeding or i just had more hitchhikers that were hiding or to small to spot initially?

[MABJ]

I can't say as I don't know everything about your tank. Watch where the food goes and if it gets eaten. If you see stuff lying around, you've over fed.

Snails should get scraps and algae.

[shift]

I just added about 10 shrimp so hopefully they get all the extras