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I got plants and they had little black snails on them so I washed them off but I may have missed 1 will they harm plants??

"A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man" Simpsons

They won't decimate your plants at all. You may notice that some of your plants get holes in the leaves from the snails munching, but unless they multiply like crazy, it's not likely that they'll kill all of your plants.
That said, most people think of these snails as pests and try to get rid of them. They do multiply very quickly and are very difficult to get rid of once established. There are a number of posts about getting rid of snails that you might want to search for if you want more info for getting rid of them.

Hoping that there must be a word for everything I mean...

Would they do any harm in a non-planted tank?

Is there any species that wont eat live plants?

"A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man" Simpsons

Malaysian trumpet snails wont. They're livebearing snails which I absolutly love . Stay small, dont eat plants, burrow in the substrate and are effectivly the earthworm of the fish tank. You couldn't ask for a better behaved snail .
Best of all mine came free with my first java fern...I was lucky to get them instead of a pest snail .

^_^[font color="#999999][hr width='40%']"When you try your best but you don't succeed. When you get what you want but not what you need
When you feel so tired but you can't sleep
Stuck in reverse
And the tears come streaming down your face
When you lose something you cannot replace. When you love someone but it goes to waste
COULD IT BE WORSE?" ~Coldplay" ][hr width='40%']"When you try your best but you don't succeed. When you get what you want but not what you need
When you feel so tired but you can't sleep
Stuck in reverse
And the tears come streaming down your face
When you lose something you cannot replace. When you love someone but it goes to waste
COULD IT BE WORSE?" ~Coldplay

I got a question.... I have mts in my betta tank. This tank gets 100% water changes. So, will the hot water rushing over the gravel kill the snails?

Never do 100% water changes

"A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man" Simpsons

Depends on how hot the water is. MTS reproduce more it seems from what I've read/noticed in warmer water. But if you're using too hot of water they obviously wont like it. Currently my home tank is close to 90F and the MTS are doing okay.

bcwcat22 bettas frequently get 100% changes. Although I agree that water changes should be closer to 95% ....For me it was just easier to not have to net the fish out.

^_^[font color="#999999][hr width='40%']"When you try your best but you don't succeed. When you get what you want but not what you need
When you feel so tired but you can't sleep
Stuck in reverse
And the tears come streaming down your face
When you lose something you cannot replace. When you love someone but it goes to waste
COULD IT BE WORSE?" ~Coldplay" ][hr width='40%']"When you try your best but you don't succeed. When you get what you want but not what you need
When you feel so tired but you can't sleep
Stuck in reverse
And the tears come streaming down your face
When you lose something you cannot replace. When you love someone but it goes to waste
COULD IT BE WORSE?" ~Coldplay

Sorry should have read closer

"A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man" Simpsons

Mts won't mind as long as the water isn't too hot for the betta. I don't know why you'd be adding really hot water to your betta tank anyway. Mts will also out compete those snails that do nibble on plants. So far they've been a great addition to my tanks.

Some snails can survive temperature fluctuations, and you should never use hot water straight from the tap to do your water changes. Boiling and bleaching work to get rid of snails, but also lead to their own share of problems. If you have a bunch of dead snails hidden in your gravel, it can cause an ammonia spike which could kill your betta. Not to mention that there are fewer things that smell worse than dead snails.

Try keeping them under control by putting a piece of vegetable in the tank at night, then taking it, and all the snails munching happily away on it, out of the tank in the morning. If you squish the snails against the glass, your betta may actually eat them. Getting a larger snail like a mystery snail will also curb the pest snail population by eating eggs and baby snails, and mystery snails need a mate to reproduce and leave very obvious eggs that are easily removed, so you don't need to worry about introducing a new problem.

Hoping that there must be a word for everything I mean...

I usually do a 100% change and wash out the tank with hot water before adding cooler water and conditioner. I was worried it would kill the snails, but a 95% water change seems simplier and less deadly for the snails.

Water changes seem like an unusually harsh solution for snails. Especially as most of you seem to have forgotten that young snails are probably colonising your filter too, so the whole water change thing starts to look a bit irrelevant.

The free swimming stage of the snail is fairly short and it all seems a bit drastic for such a small period of time. Removing eggs when you find them will help tho, when you look closely you will see patches of jelly laid on plants usually a few mm's long , just scrape it off and bin it.

i find control far better than eradication, especially when dwarf puffers eradicate them completely, eating snails to the degree that they never become mature enough to breed. A lot of loaches will do the job for you too, most plants can take a bit of a chew now and again and if the snails are kept small by predatory fish there will never be much of an issue since they will mostly confine themselves to eating algae and detritus.

Personally i dont think risking 100% water changes is worth it, bearing in mind that the damage from snails controlled by fish is minimal, and you can totally decimate the bacteria in your filter by doing this. Only massive cases of toxic poisoning are worth 100% water changes.

The biggest risk from snails is that they serve well as an intermediary host for roundworm and tapeworm, especially if you think there might be a chance they came from "outdoors". Though usually only creatures that eat them will be susceptible to infection.

ps putting hot water from the tap into your tank is not a good idea for two reasons, the first is copper poisoning, and the second is illustrated by the sounds: "dink" "crash" and "kertinkle".

removing snails manually will work eventually if you are diligent enough,especially when you remember to check the filter media for youngsters, certainly you can remove substrates to a bucket and wash it with boiling water. and frankly id rather do that repeatedly than risk the health of my fish just for the sake of a few holes in some plants, even filter media can be washed over time doing one layer and then another over months.

Last edited by longhairedgit at 25-Aug-2005 11:04

Last edited by longhairedgit at 25-Aug-2005 11:12

The free swimming stage of the snail is fairly short and it all seems a bit drastic for such a small period of time. Removing eggs when you find them will help tho, when you look closely you will see patches of jelly laid on plants usually a few mm's long , just scrape it off and bin it.

Free swimming stage? Snails do not have a free swimming stage. You can watch them hatch and crawl around. Now with MTS since they are livebearing I'm not certain but I've seen tiny crawling mts dots. A puffer is not a good option for a small betta tank. Chances are in such close confinement the puffer is going to nip the bettas fins and the betta is not going to respect the puffers territory.

longhairedgit, you completely misunderstood what I was saying!
I don't want to kill them, I'm worried about them. And a 1.25 gallon area is far too small for dwarf puffers or loaches. The 100% water changes are not to kill the snails. It's just far simplier than a 10% or 20% water change on such a small area.

ok the free swimming bit- the fact is that baby snails can drift freely in water- theyre light and have no means of fighting a current- many of them are so tiny they are lifted by the slightest current if the foot isnt completely adhered, and being young they totally screw it up. The eggs are adhered and so dont get dragged into the filter. How else do you explain that they get into the filter eh?

Did they at less than 1mm long scale a 3 feet high piece of glass, endure a hard crawl in dry atmosphere over several inches under lights that generate about near 100 degree heat, then deliberately find the upper end of the outflow pipe , crawl all the way back down it and then specifically up throught the filter guard on an eheim just to crawl down 10 feet of pipe to get to the filter?

Get real dude, its free floating, free swimming ,free drifting.We are arguing about semantics here. Whatever it is they go in the water and get sucked up. And besides a lot of snails swim even as adults - they use the foot to drift and then negotiate the surface film, some snails are capable of changing their own buoyancy with air too. It isnt wiggling a tail, or having flaggelate arms like shrimp or neonate crabs and other planktonic animals, but its swimming,theyre freshwater snails and its the best they can do.

As for snails being livebearing? Most of them arent.It depends entirely on the species and as yet I have seen no species identification of the aforementioned snails. The pond snails and aquarium snails here are certainly lay eggs in secretive jelly, I should know ive kept enough of them through aquatic snails all the way up to giant african land snails. Youll be telling me snails arent hermaphroditic next.

As for dwarf puffers they dont always fin nip - read the bit I submitted in the dwarf puffer section of the forums. I had no idea the tank was just over one gallon and frankly I wouldnt keep any fish in a tank that small.You can get some pretty small species of loach though. I also hadnt assumed snails in a 1 and a bit gallon tank really needed technical advice- just pick em out, and squash em- how easy do you want it to be? Youll barely get your arm wet.lol.

Its actually kinda nice that youre keeping a few, i often think people panic about snails- I was really giving advice for a bigger tank where finding every snail in amongst pounds of bogwood and banks of living plants can be a real pain.




Last edited by longhairedgit at 10-Sep-2005 23:25