Pest and Snail free live plants
- Thread starter jft
- Start date
The tissue cultured plants you can get at petsmart/petco generally do well for me and come pest free.
Even if you buy 'pest free", I would treat them as if they had pests. I learned the hard way on that one.
Tissue cultures are probably as close to snail free as you can get. Any other plants will most likely have hitchhikers. Distributors do their pest to keep them clean but they still sneak through.
Yeah, sure...
The check's in the mail...I'll love you forever...guaranteed snail free...and other oft-repeated lies.
I agree that tissue culture specimens are usually good in this regard. They're great if you just want to try a new species of plant in your established tank. But if you are setting up a new planted tank, one of the best ways to avoid algae is to plant it well right from the get-go. If you just start with a few tiny tissue cultures, they still require just as much light as a full tank of plants, but the tiny plant biomass just can't use up nitrates and other nutrients fast enough...so naturally algae steps in to take up the slack. A well-planted tank is less likely to be quickly overgrown with algae because all the plants compete for those nutrients. And when you buy those plants...you almost invariably get snails.
Rather than fretting about them...It's much easier and less stress-free to simply learn to love 'em.
The check's in the mail...I'll love you forever...guaranteed snail free...and other oft-repeated lies.
I agree that tissue culture specimens are usually good in this regard. They're great if you just want to try a new species of plant in your established tank. But if you are setting up a new planted tank, one of the best ways to avoid algae is to plant it well right from the get-go. If you just start with a few tiny tissue cultures, they still require just as much light as a full tank of plants, but the tiny plant biomass just can't use up nitrates and other nutrients fast enough...so naturally algae steps in to take up the slack. A well-planted tank is less likely to be quickly overgrown with algae because all the plants compete for those nutrients. And when you buy those plants...you almost invariably get snails.
Rather than fretting about them...It's much easier and less stress-free to simply learn to love 'em.
At times we have brought in new plants and placed them in a quarantine tank before moving them into the final show tank.
In the quarantine tank can be at least one Assassin Snail.
Online, they also advertise snail traps of various types to bait and remove snail populations in numbers.
We had to be patient, and try to plan on quarantine periods for incoming plants.
In the quarantine tank can be at least one Assassin Snail.
Online, they also advertise snail traps of various types to bait and remove snail populations in numbers.
We had to be patient, and try to plan on quarantine periods for incoming plants.