Snails!

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Nozebleed

Feeder Fish
MFK Member
Nov 18, 2008
195
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Dublin Ireland
If you found snails in your tank would you look at it as the perfect opportunity to strip the tank down and start again!

I was doing a was a water change today and i found a teeny snail on the glass..so i decided to have a look in the filter and in there i found about 50 snails..many dead,but plenty live one lording it up on whatever dirt was there. So i took filter apart and boiled the life out of everything except sponges and tubing which connects tank to filter..the tubing is bound to have a few snails..now i know they are very hard to completely eradicate. so do you think i would be best off starting my tank up again? i must stressi only found 1 snail in he tank and the tank has been running for about 8 months. What are my options?
Could i add:
A) Snail eating fish?
B) Meds?? (not too keen on using meds)
C) Complete overhaul! what the best way to go about it? clean everything with boiling water?


any help would be great...thanks.
 
imo nothing if they are barely noticable it is not a big deal and im sure your africans will keep the population under control. i would say try not to overfeed, because that will be giving the snails food.
 
honestly i dont know what snails they are...i believe they came in on some java moss. i have 7 frontosa & 3 syno cats in the tank at the minute...someone did recommend i buy 1 or 2 clown loaches? its possible im overacting! i have kept this tank spotless since i starting it up...never missed a water change and clean the coral sand everyweek..i just a little pissed i added the java moss without rtating it somehow..lesson learned!
 
snails are all about prefrence im a hippy fish fish guy who says theyre the natural order of things and they have a niche too, so what i do is get apple snails to out compete the small ones, but that is allso depending on what type of fish you have. cichlids will eat any snail big or small. but if your snails mess withyour Bling complex than you can get some snail eradicator. they could have an agg batch any where and if you leave one than there will be many more.....
 
Strip down is such a waste of time for something as harmless as "pest" snails. All you need is cut back on feeding and do more vacuuming. If you're not satisfied, manually grab each of them and crush them as food for your fish and use lettuce to bait them.

Obviously, chemicals are out of the question. Dead snails elevate ammonia very quickly and you do not want to wake up one morning with several dead fish, thanks to elevated ammonia and copper-based meds.

Look at the bright side. They eat food leftovers which are far worse pollutants than the additional wastes they make but it also means you need to really cut down your feeding. Snails are part of the ecosystem.
 
Dont panic,like the others said its not the end of the world.Smash em,the fish will love em!
 
most africans will snack on most snails. snails are really not as bad as people make it out to be at all! starting over will cause more stress to your stock than having the snails would and you are more likely to lose fish due to the stress of starting over than the snails
 
I would leave them, but I have loaches....
 
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