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Blue Ramshorns - Saints or Sinners?

A

AlanRR

Member
Joined
22 Feb 2019
Messages
103
Location
Yorkshire
Hi all

I really like the look of Blue Ramshorn snails and was wondering if anyone had experience with them. I’m considering getting some for my aquarium but have read that ramshorns can breed prolifically and become a pest. I don’t fancy adding snail killing to my weekly maintenance schedule but would that become necessary in order to keep numbers at a reasonable level? I would also like to keep some cherry/tiger shrimp in the same aquarium so they would need to coexist.

Thanks

Alan
 
Just keep a relatively clean aquarium with little organic debris lying around and they won't breed out of control, if you have soft water they wont breed and grow as fast either. Also, with a large population of cherry shrimp, the shrimp will always out compete the snails (and sometimes eat the eggs) so you won't have too many ramshorns :). Even if you were to keep them overfed without shrimp in a hard water tank, you could just add some loaches or assassin snails to quickly control the population

I love ramshorn snails lol, I say go for it!
 
You should be able to trade in fancy snails at your lfs for credit

They do excellent in softwater - at least the wild type versions do ;)
I’ve not managed to track down any of the blues
 
As mentioned above, don't overfeed and you'll be able to control the population nicely, I personally am very fond of ramshorns; and hope that their colours etc are line bred as shrimp are.

In terms of soft water, I found mine really suffer in the absence of foods high in minerals; try to give them shrimp king mineral or Dennerle shrimp stixx as an example, to keep their shells strong
 
I'm not sure how and if it works on all types of fresh water snails with color.. But it might not be a strain.. Maybe its diet related that finaly makes the color.
But recent studies revealed snails are not color blind, they definitively see and react to colors... There are also studies going on in Color polymorphism in land snails, that seemingly changes if under threat by avian predators. There simply seems to be more going on in a snails brain than we might want to believe. I once bought red Ramshorn but now after keeping them for a few years they more seem to be multi colored with Red, orange, yello and some even white blodges. Also keep them outdoors there they rather go dark brown.

I also have pond snails, the one that are kept indoors are white colored with some light olive green spots, while ofspring from the same parents kept outdoors are dark green with yellow and dark brown spots. I have hudreds of pond snail by now and find a variety of color between white, green and brown devided over different invironments i keep them in. And all are offspring from one snail that sneeked in with some plants i took from a local pond.

Snails definitively can send a variety of color pigmenst to their shell.. It also seems to that only the superficial shell layer contains these pigments. Leave a snailless shell in the water it will slowly disolve and all slowly loose color and turn plane white in the end. And its not UV influence bleaching it, because shells i store dry and don't decay don't loose color.
 
Succes!.. Snails are awsome and fascinating beeings... :)

Did you know? Pond snails can be trained to be hand fed and even recognize their owner..
 
zozo said:
Succes!.. Snails are awsome and fascinating beeings... :)

Did you know? Pond snails can be trained to be hand fed and even recognize their owner..
Click to expand...

LOL no I didn’t. My daughters goldfish certainly use to get very excited when my wife (who use to feed it) entered the room though.
 

The guy doesn't know it isn't a goldfish.. :rolleyes:


I this one i guess a lot of people will think it a trick with magnets.. :lol:
 
3 Baby Blues arrived in the post yesterday! They are very cute and haven’t stopped moving. They are only about half the size of my smallest fingernail but have already managed to remove the small patch of visible algae from the glass at the back of the tank :thumbsup:
 
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