Treating plants for snails.

I dont think Ice dip would work, those snails and snail eggs are like the terminator. I'm going thru this now. I ordered a plant package of the web for my 55, didnt treat the plants first, and in 2 weeks my tank was full of snails. Drained the water, and the eco complete was only slighly samp, and the snails still survived for a week when I removed the eco

I just tore the whole tank down, removed the eco completed, and im starting over again.

I heard of a product called Lime-It thats suppose to work good, but I cant seem to find it anywhere.

pk-sd said:

We all know when we add plants to tank, you run the risk of adding those small pesky snails to the tank at the same time. I have read about treating plants with bleach or alum before adding to the tank.

Bleach can be bad for some plants and alum is not that easy to find in stores.

Anyone tried treating plants with very high pH/alk solution(16-18 dkh)? Or doing a iced water dip ?

Click to expand...

I bet that Oscar in your avatar would eat em

With patience, you can smash them against the glass as you see them. If you catch them young, before they mature and lay eggs, you can get them to a very small number.

Loaches eat snails, as do pufferfish.

Other than that, just learn to live with the little guys. I kind of like mine.

Darwf Pea Puffer can clean out those little snails you commonly see. If you have some Malaysian Trumpet Snails you might be out of luck. I got a post on the Malaysian Trumpet Snails in the general threads, you can check that out.

Becareful though, after the puffer is done eating all the snails he's going to go after your community fishes fins, I learn it the hard way.

Careful with smashing them with your fingers, wear gloves or smash them with something, I have heard of a person who did this, and their finger got infected from it and it was really bad.

Potassium Permanganate is plant safe and can kill snails, bugs, etc on plants. It also stains the snail eggs, that you can easily remove them or the leaves they are on. They are supposed to kill snail eggs too, but I wanted the assurance of no snails.

I have run across a couple mentions where th P. permanganate dip apparently didn't work. Of course the plants may not have been dipped long enough, or it could have been any one of a number of other factors. And then again, snails may just be related to cockroaches and will survive a nuclear holocaust :icon_roll . Every time I've gotten a severe infestation I've had to resort to getting a couple loaches which has always worked. Of course you need to make sure you really want loaches as odds are that you're not going to get them back out without tearing down the tank. They're fast little buggers. Yo-yos worked for me. They couldn't get the really big ramshorns, but that was fine, I kind of liked a snail or two "running" :hihi: around, just not about a million of 'em.