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How to eliminate snails

amy4342

Member
Joined
22 May 2008
Messages
338
Hi all

Unbelievable, I've added Ramshorn snails to my new setup, despite my best efforts not to. I'm most unhappy to be honest - I despise the little critters. It's going to be a CRS breeding tank, so obviously I can't use chemicals. There is some good news - they're newly hatched, im pretty sure there are no adults. Any ideas? I could add some loaches, but would they eat newly hatched snails? I was also thinking, would high levels of ammonia kill them? I know this would create problems with algae, but I'd rather deal with that than snails to be honest. What about temperature? I'm assuming a high/low enough temperature to kill the snails would also create problems for the plants and possibly for the glass tank aswell. Could I make it acidic enough to kill the snails by damaging their shells or something? I can play about with the water as much as I want because there's no livestock in there, and I'm planning on doing 80% water changes daily with RO water for the next 2 weeks anyway. Please, any ideas anyone might have would be welcome, I'm really desperate to get rid of them!

Thanks!
 
Loaches are good for removing snails - but they can damaged plant leafs or assasin snails, they dont muliply as quickly as the other pest snails - these snails seek out the pest snails and suck them from their shells.

Regards
paul.
 
Thanks Paul. I might try loaches - I can always re-home them in another tank afterwards. Do you think they would eat the snails being as they are so small? They're literally pin pricks some of them. Assassin snails are good - I have them in my nano, but I feel they wouldn't clear the problem before the snails got big enough to breed and multiply, by which time it's all over.
 
I have the same problem in my nano 28l tank.
It simply houses around 100 cherry shrimp in there and at night I see the insides covered with small pin pricks of snails stuck. I have found that feeding the shrimp less and a small water change every 3rd day helps.

Also any left behind waste is removed, but with ever growing shrimp fry sometimes its quite hard.

So wha I done was find some small tubing, and then waft the areas with any excess mess or debris and suck it up from that.

Over time the snails will become less.

Ive also put in about 4-5 baby assasin snails in there, hoping that they might be able to do some damage.
 
i use a puffer fish, at the moment i have a red eye.i just put the plants in his tank for a couple of days and he eats all the snails.then they can go in the main tank lovely little fish to.
 
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