# snail advice



## steviepc7 (Jan 23, 2010)

yo yo,

Wanting snails that eat dead plant matter and excess food. any suggestions?


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## snail_keeper97 (Mar 10, 2011)

hello stevie,
i would strongly suggest the ramshorn snail. these snails will just straight onto a carrot or any excess plant if they cant find any more food. they addapt well to most fish appart from guppies that eat them etc. its your choice on how many you want to get if you get some.


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## chris oe (Feb 27, 2009)

depends on how much extra food and dead plant matter you plan on having. There's the small red ramshorn (usually less than an inch across) that often comes along as a hitchhiker on plants and is pretty good at policing algae on glass and the occasional flake, but will tend to have a population explosion if you have a lot of extra food and algae. 

The bigger, striped ramshorn (usually 2 inches across or so at adulthood) is unrelated to the other ramshorn and will chow down on dead plants, live plants, stray food, you name it. I would not recommend this one for a planted tank. 

the Pomacea bridgesii (I think actually now they're called Pomacea diffusa?) are great for tank pick up, they only eat dead vegetation and dead animal matter, and will eat stray food flakes, trouble is if you don't have enough dead veg and stray food they'll die of starvation, even in a heavily planted tank, and a dead snail of that size can cause an ammonia spike, so if you get one of these, make sure you feed them when the debris runs out. They also don't do algae much once they're mature. They'll scrape the glass a bit, but they're not thorough. 

Another nice thing about the diffusas, if you only have one, you will not run into baby snails. They're one of the species that has separate sexes, so if you don't have two snails, you won't have more, although sometimes the females, if they're well fed and happy, will produce an occasional sterile egg mass.


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## ARMS87 (Jan 2, 2011)

snail_keeper97 said:


> hello stevie,
> they addapt well to most fish appart from guppies that eat them etc.


Guppies don't eat them. I have guppies and can't shift the snails fast enough.

Some aquarium species will eat ramshorn snails. More voracious eaters include loaches (such as the clown loach or any other member of the genus botia), bettas, crayfish, terrapins and most gouramis—though many other fish will also consume snail meat. The larger apple snail will also prey upon ramshorn snails.

Good fish roommates for snails include, but are not limited to, danios, guppies, White Cloud Mountain Minnows, neon tetras, and cory catfish. All of these are non-aggressive fish that cohabitate easily with snails.


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## chris oe (Feb 27, 2009)

Guppies are a six of one half dozen of another with ramshorns. Well fed guppies don't tend to eat adult ramshorns (Planorbis Gyralus parvus) , but they do snack on baby ramshorns and if you go on vacation and don't assign somebody to feed your guppies while you're gone they do pretty well dining on the ramshorns. The thing to remember is if your tank has extra food and algae the reproduction rate on your ramshorns will be really fast, and the guppies, however hungry, will not be able to keep up. Ramshorns breed faster than guppies, a lot faster if there is available food. But if the guppies are hungry, there tends not to be a lot of extra food available for the ramshorns either, and the ramshorn population will decline.


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## friz (Mar 12, 2011)

Big fan of the ramshorn also. Just starting to mess with Malasian trumpet snails.


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## NeonShark666 (Dec 13, 2010)

I would recommend the Mystery Snail. They are large, easy to keep track of and will not overpopulate your tank. If you end up spawning your fish you need to remove them as they eat fish eggs. Snails don't normally eat dead plants material but are more interested in protein on the bottom lilke excess food particles, fish eggs and dead fish.


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## chris oe (Feb 27, 2009)

Mystery snail (was called mystery snail in aquarium trade due to difficulty in telling the difference between different species of Pomacea, particularly canalculata and bridgesii) are these days (at least in the US aquarium trade) all bridgesii (or diffusa as they're now called - name change) and diffusa are all dietrivores, meaning they prefer to eat dead things, especially dead protein and plant material. They're also called Apple Snail and a host of other names (often describing color, diffusas can be bred into a bunch of different shell and body colors) in the trade, but if you use the genus species name you can be certain of the identification.


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