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I bought around 14 apple snails so I could feed them at regular intervals to my clowns and breed some as well. I fed around 4 to the clowns.

All the other snails are in my cichlid tank that has the following inhabitants:

1 male convict - 5 inches
2 salvinis - 5 inches each
1 JD - 3 inches
2 raphael catfish - 7 inches each

6 Filament barbs

My snails have been disappearing and a couple of days later, I discover an empty shell that has been completely cleaned out and I suspect somebody's eating them, but who

The cichlids are eating them.

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I'm not your neighbor, you Bakersfield trash.

Applesnails cannot be kept with most any cichlids, loaches, or labyrinth fish. They will either devour them overnight or slowly peck at them until the snails refuse to come out of their shells and starve to death. Even if the adults don't get eaten the babies will. If you want to breed them your better off getting a tank for just applesnails and putting 1 male and 2 females in there. A 10g works fine for the smaller brig species. Canas and paludosas would probably need a 30-40g. Drop the water level around 4" and feed them alot of meaty foods with the occasional vegetable and you'll have 1000s of babies within a few weeks.

Definetly the cichlids. You could keep them with little maintenance alone in an unfiltered ond unlighted container. Just make sure they have access to surface air.

I've just come from a GeoCities page in which someone describes how his mated pair of Black Belt Cichlids crunch snails at a rate of knots - here is the page in question.

Chances are that the Dempsey is the principal culprit given that it's likely to be the biggest Cichlid in there, but the others will have a go if the Apple Snails are the right size.

Since you also have Raphael Cats in there, I'd watch those too. I haven't heard of Raphael Cats eating snails, but who knows?

The Cichlids, however, are known snail predators. In fact I might decide to use this information to deal with a snail problem in one of my other aquaria ...


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002