A bristle nose, guppies, and snails

[CrazyOscarLady]

I have a 30gal tank that I'm breeding some guppies in (for Oscar food) and am temporarily housing a bristle nose pleco in.

I have a general back of the tank filter and do at least one water change a week, but I'm getting overrun with snails.
Mainly because I over feed a little (flakes and veggies) to make sure everyone gets enough to eat.
I've looked around and while I'd love to just get some clown loaches my tank can't handle that.

I've read that guppies do prefer closer to brackish water anyway and it would help killing off the snails but I can't seem to find a definite answer for the pleco?
Some say they're fine others say they are strick freshwater and can't handle the salt.

Is there a happy middle ground where I can kill off the snails but not the pleco?
Any other ideas for getting ride of the snails?

I'm not going to lie and will admit that I'm a terrible fish owner and I don't know the levels in my tank. I use Prime conditioner, and like I said I do a water change every week. I feed flakes, NLS betta pellets (left overs; someone's gotta eat 'em), various veggies and the occasional blood worms or shrimp (mysis and brine).

My Oscar gets a little different diet but the same water care and I've had him for almost 4yrs so I'm doing something right.

I tried to answer any questions I could think of but if I missed something please ask I'll answer to the best of my ability.

Ps: I do have the device to read the salt content of the water (I was looking at getting a brackish tank but decided it wouldn't work out at that time)

 

[Beetlebug515]

First off, the pleco will not tolerate a brackish tank. And I'm not sure that guppies will either. Could be wrong though. I know mollies will, there could be some confusion there. If your tank isn't planted, go bare bottom. Suck out all of the substrate along with the snails. The other thing you could do, and I've actually had decent luck with this, is switch to using ro water. Snails can't tolerate soft water because they need high levels of calcium for their shells. A 50/50 mix of ro to tap water should help, depending on your tap water parameters.

 

[CrazyOscarLady]

First off, the pleco will not tolerate a brackish tank. And I'm not sure that guppies will either. Could be wrong though. I know mollies will, there could be some confusion there. If your tank isn't planted, go bare bottom. Suck out all of the substrate along with the snails. The other thing you could do, and I've actually had decent luck with this, is switch to using ro water. Snails can't tolerate soft water because they need high levels of calcium for their shells. A 50/50 mix of ro to tap water should help, depending on your tap water parameters.

Well there's no live plants but there's TONS of fake plants and a little sand, I'm mostly worried about sucking up all the babies. Im just now starting to get where I can have enough to feed my Oscar and still have breeding stock.
Any tips?

From what I've read professional guppy breeders actually keep their guppies in salt water and feed all live food.
Either way it's not worth losing my pleco.
I can't get any RO water right now but I'll look at ways to try and make my water softer....the tap here is pretty hard (NE KS)

 

[predatorkeeper87]

guppies would breed in a drainage ditch next to a nuke plant so don't worry about that, the pleco will die with any high dosage of salinity in the tank so nix that idea as well. Without a fish that will eat them you are going to be tasked with removing them by hand, cut back feedings extensively and start pulling adult snails out of the tank as you see them.

P.S. a few snails are good for the tank IMO.

 

[Beetlebug515]

Or you can use assassin snails. They are much more attractive than the Malaysian trumpet snails you likely have, they will eat the other snails leaving only an empty she'll, and they reproduce very slowly which makes it easy to keep the population in check.