I know this is an old post.. but I had some Pagoda snails recently. It didn't turn out too well, unfortunately, but I was quite taken by their appearance. I kept them in a covered tank where I also keep a floating frog, a single pair of Daisy Rice fish, two female Dario dario & about a dozen Pygmy cories. It also houses half a dozen decent sized apple snails, four Devil faunus, or Lava snails, Olive MTS, and Bicolored cone snails, the scientific name of the bicolours escapes me at the moment. There was also a pair of yellow Poso Rabbit snails that reproduced quickly, giving me 3 young in less than two months.
I started feeding the apple snails quite a lot not long after I got the Pagoda snails. I fed too much as it turned out. A sinking pellet food by Cobalt, algae based with some probitoic content. They sink like rocks, dissolving quickly to fine powder, which soon sifts into the substrate. It's a type of aquatic plant substrate by Schultz, a baked clay that looks superficially like kitty litter, but does not break down. It was probably too coarse for the Pagodas. But all the snails would come 'running' to get this pellet food and the apple snails began breeding prolifically soon after i started using it. I also fed some NLS Small Fry Starter, another fine powdered food the snails seemed to enjoy.
However, because I was overfeeding, the substrate started suffering from anaerobic bacterial activity. I didn't notice it right away, thinking the odd bubble I saw coming up was from the apple snails, who often release a few bubbles. By the time I realized the substrate needed to be dealt with, all but one of the Pagoda snails had died. Because they like to dig beneath the substrate, I did not find them right away. The first one that died certainly contributed to the problems with the substrate. Oddly, no other snail was affected, though three of the cories died the day I cleaned it up. I think they were either too stressed or were overexposed to the substrate gases while I was trying to catch them to remove them.
The last pagoda died a few days after I cleaned up the substrate. Fortunately the shell was visible and when i noticed it hadn't moved for awhile I checked to see if it was alive. It was, barely, but died a couple of days later.
They were very shy when they first went into the tank but they soon started moving around. They are clearly very susceptible to substrate that's less than clean, and I feel truly rotten that the substrate deteriorated as much as it did. There was a decent flow of water in the tank but probably not enough for this particular snail. Having a faster flow pushed the poor frog around too much, though it did not seem to bother the fish. I would not try any more Pagodas until I can set up my 30G tank for my filter feeder shrimps. with a Hydor Nano pump running all the time to circulate food for them. It was taken down to allow for radiator repairs my landlord hasn't yet done.. so the shrimp are making do in a smaller tank with a smaller pump until I can give them their own tank back.
Based on a German site I ran across, I would feed Pagodas spirulina powder too, next time I try some. I noted that all of them had eroded shell tips, every one in the store tank was like that so I think it's likely normal for them, as it seems to be for many conical shelled creatures. They do have sexes and give live birth, but are not that easy to breed, from the little I can find out. But they do breed in fresh water. I hope to try these snails again when I get a tank set up that will suit them better, with a sand type substrate and a lot more water flow, and of course, no swamp gas coming up.
It is only the second time I've ever had swamp gas happen, the first time was shortly after I began fish keeping again after decades of not having any fish. I made the common mistake of feeding too much and vacuuming too little. Given how much I was feeding the snails I should have monitored the substrate condition much more closely. I don't vacuum it because of the heavy plantings and the frog, as it becomes quite stressed with much intervention in the tank. Now I'm keeping a very close eye on the substrate, and have cut back drastically on food since the clean up.
Tank now has yellow Neo shrimp in it along with the frog, fish and other snails, to assist in consuming some of the fine particles of food better. All the inhabitants are currently doing very well. Even the Daisy rice fish have begun spawning in this tank, which was a surprise, and there are more than twenty apple snail egg masses waiting to hatch. There are fewer new egg masses showing up since I cut back on food, though I truly don't know how much correlation there is between the amount of food and the rate of reproduction with apple snails. They are certainly greedy feeders. The rabbit snails were sold, as they kept uprooting all the plants and trimming off the crowns of my American swords as well.
If you find Pagodas and want to try them, be sure they have plenty of current, very clean substrate that's finely textured and fine textured food with algae in it for them. They do like to search the substrate, as the Rabbit snails and MTS snails do, but the way they move is not nearly as likely to uproot plants as a Rabbit snail's humping motion does.
