[Pixieglyphix]

Hello fellow fish friends. I am a newbie and need some help. I set up my 50h bow front in August. To start i had river rock layered bottom with philodendron and guppies to breed with a platy and juli cory. I added an Amazon sword and Granite chip gravel while i cycled through some guppies that didnt survive. Guppies start having fry so i add some different plants for them to hide in. Sadly this is when i get snails. Around Oct i do my first big snail control; remove all the river rocks and scrub them in bleach water, remove all other decorations, clean off all 6 different kinds of plants. I get the tank replanted and get an assassin snail to take care of the ones i missed. Guppies thriving, plants doing good, snails still multiplying. So i get a pair of yoyo loaches. I have the loaches for over a month now, and every morning i am squashing at least 30 MTS. So i set up a 20l tank and transfered the guppies, platyes, loaches, and cory to. They still seem happy as i have a new batch of 30 fry. I have bleached then boiled the river rocks to kill any eggs that may still be on them. I have all my plants in a bucket of old tank water. I deconstructed my 50h today.

Sorry for the long back story. Question i have is how do i treat the granite gravel to kill the snails? I have to 50h filled with fresh water and starting to cycle. Another question is how should i clean or treat my plants before i replant my tank?

Thank you for listening and advise is appreciated.

 

[elusive77]

It is pretty much impossible to get rid of MTS mechanically. You will never get rid of them all and they will just reproduce again. They are live bearers, so the treatments for killing eggs won't work. When I setup a new tank I was very very cautious because I didn't want to bring them over. I get rid of all of my hardscape. I couldn't bring myself to start all over with my plants, so I tried several different methods of soaking and treating them to kill snails. None of them worked though and i still have them in my new tank. The good news is that they are actually very beneficial to a tank. They will eat left over food and help keep a tank clean. They can become unsightly though when they are covering everything in your tank.

One option that might work, but that I haven't tried is medicating the tank for parasites. Something like Wormer Plus or Praziquantel kills parasites in fish, but it also kills snails. I wouldn't recommend treating a tank full of fish that don't need it, but it sounds like you've already moved them. Again I haven't tried it, but I've seen a lot of posts about it. Google it and decide for yourself.

 

[Pixieglyphix]

Elusive77 thank you for the suggestion. I read something about copper being toxic and killing the snails. It could harm some of the plants though. I guess it is just me being paranoid, but i ended up boiling all if the gravel today. Good thing i have a 49 qt stock pot. My kids think we are having rocks for dinner lol.

 

[minorhero]

I would try using chemical treatments to kill any snails in the tank if it were me and I wanted them gone.

 

[Leeatl]

I took an old net and made a scoop with plastic canvas . I wait till an hour or two after lights out and scrape them off the glass . I keep them under control this way . See pic......

 

[mboley]

Assasin snails worked for me, you need more than one though.

 

[jellopuddinpop]

Here's something I've been thinking about, and though I no longer need it, I'm going to keep it in my back pocket...

Since your fish are already out, why not just absolutely crush them with CO2? Like.... as much as you can possibly get in there. Since they don't lay eggs then even the babies would get hit, and once the CO2 offgasses, there's no remnants of toxic chems in the tank.

Even if you don't run CO2, you could go to the store and buy a flat of plain seltzer and dump it in. Regular old seltzer water is anywhere from 6000-8000ppm CO2, and should suffocate them. Worst case, they'll start a frantic mad dash for the surface, where you can scrape them off the glass.

Extra bonus point, I don't think this will harm your plants either.

Full disclosure, I've never tried this. I have no idea if it would work at all. It just feels logically like it *should* work.

 

[greenguppy]

Wow interesting idea. I always like snails in my tanks as they are good cleaners but if I ever wanted them gone...

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[MissCris]

MTS are like glitter; sometimes you don't even know where it came from, but once it's there you'll never get it all cleaned up.

My yoyos do a decent job keeping the population managed, but they can't dig them out of the substrate. They also seem to prefer eating the smaller snails, not the really big ones. I also didn't see much snail-eating action until the loaches were grown a bit, and if I feed them too much they give up on hunting down snacks.

The humongous (I bought it 3+ years ago, it's over an inch long now) assassin snail in my 20g actually does a decent job, but it didn't seem to be near as effective back when it was a little baby assassin. For a large tank, you'll probably want more like 6 to 10 of those guys, especially at the size they usually are in the shops. You'll rarely see the assassins though. Mine will disappear for months at a time, and I'll be sure it finally died, only to have it crawl up the glass one day and shock me before it heads back into the substrate like a little armored tremors worm.

 

[dfarr67]

Assassin's don't look too bad either. They are the only ones doing their job other than yoyo's and dwarf crayfish.