native snails as food for native fish?

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mrgrackle

Feeder Fish
MFK Member
Nov 3, 2007
92
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austin, tx
I've got a 300 gallon stock tank with 10 bluegill in it, they're all small.. 1-2", there's one that might be pushing 3". Part of their natural diet is snails. I was wondering what the chances where of getting a breeding colony of native snails started in the tank.. without them being slaughtered by the bluegill.

I've got some native plants from the same river I collected the bluegill from hoping they would have some snails or snail eggs on them. My idea is to screen in an area of the tank with a bunch of plants in it. I'm hoping to get a breeding colony of snails going in there, protected from the bluegill. As they breed and try to expand the only place they'll have to go is out of the enclosure and into the rest of the tank with the bluegill.

Pipe dream? Any suggestions?
 
Sounds feasible, but why do they have to be native? Couldn't you just as easily get some pond snails as I have seen that species in local water systems before.
 
doint kill them!!

what should be his punsihment , snail lovers?

1 eat snail food for a weak
2 grow 200 snails
3 have a fresh water tank with 20 apple snails
4 touch a snail
 
1 plan would be going for numbers. If you throw about 300 in there the fish can't eat them all before they start breeding. The other thing is to put flat rocks across the bottom for the river snails to live under. Every once and a while they will come out and get eaten but many will stay alive. Also, do you know that your fish will eat snails... some of them don't know how.

I didn't realize you are from Austin too. I've had breeding colonies of snails from barton springs before so if you have those type of snails it shouldn't be too hard.
 
should work perfectly pond snails breed real fast it happend in my tank before i moved but yeah if they over populate your tank for some reason get some red ear sunnies (shell crackers) theyll decimate the snails
 
ah, well it was a nice idea but from further reading I don't think the bluegill will eat snails. Some sites list snails as part of their natural diet, but apparently it's rare that they do. There's another type of sunfish that does eat snails on a regular basis and it's one of the reasons the bluegill and it can coexist well in the same ecosystems.

dominicolas - just down by the colorado.
 
Put a tube of some sort through the screen that the ocasional snail may wonder through until you have a large enough colony.
 
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