How
to Rid Your Aquarium of Snails |
Last updated: Mar 24, 2002 |
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Snails
do a good job of cleaning up algae and food your fish leftover.
However, snails are prolific breeders. They eat and breed, eat
and breed. What's worst, since the reproduce asexually, they
don't need a partner to reproduce. In other words, they can
breed themselves. If the conditions are favourable, they will
surely over run your tank. Too much snails can become pest,
especially in a planted aquarium, as they will happily devour
your favourite plants. Common snails you will find are pond
snails and ramshorn nails (ramshorn shown in photo). You don't
even have to buy them, they just seem to appear out of nowhere
into your tank. Since they lay their eggs on plants, they probably
hitched a ride on the plants you bought at the pet shop. But
how do you get rid of the pesky buggers? Removing them individually
is out of the question as well as next to impossible. Here are
a few strategies you can try: |
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Use food against them |
The idea is to lure the snails onto a piece of
food they like and then pull them out. A slice of cucumber is
my personal weapon of choice. You can leave cucumber in your
tank without worrying about it contaminating the water. Some
people also use lettuce and soften it first with hot water.
Weight down the slice of cucumber or piece of lettuce in the
bottom of the tank at night. By the morning, you should have
collected a colony of hungry (or "licorish") snails. Remove
the cucumber or lettuce and discard the snails. |
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Tip: You can tie a piece of white string to the
food and use it to pull the food from the water in the morning.
The dye in coloured string maybe hazardous to your fish. |
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Use the snails as food |
If your fish only knew how to get those tasty
morsels out of the shells, they would gladly eat them. The shells
of pond snails are fairly soft. Although it sounds gross, you
can crush them between your fingers and feed them to your fish.
However you decide to crush them, just remember they are very
nutritious and live food helps encourage your fish to breed.
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Get fish that can eat them |
OK, so crushing them is too gross for you to
handle. Why not get some fish that can do it themselves? The
problem here is that if they are strong enough to crush a snail,
what would they do to your other fish? These type of fish are
usually aggressive and may present you with a new problem. Clown
Loaches are well known for eating snails. They actually suck
them out and not crush them. The fish that will do the crushing
is a Pufferfish. Pufferfish actually need hard foods to grind
down their teeth to prevent them from growing too long. Some
species of cichlids and catfish will eat snails as well. Some
fish may not be able to eat the snails, but they can eat the
snails' eggs (which too are protected by a hard coating). Siamese
fighters will take care of the eggs for you. |
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Prevention |
To prevent snail from flourishing, you need to reduce their
food supply. Not overfeeding you fish prevents the snails
from getting leftovers. Snails primary natural food source
is algae. Overfed fish produce more excrement (poop), which
in turn provides the nourishment for the algae to grow.
To reduce the chance of getting snails in the first place,
when purchasing plants, remove the snail eggs by gently rubbing
the plant with your fingers. This is easier said than done
since the eggs are often transparent.
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