LogFAQs > #946423633

Chicken posted...

Oh this was like 15 years ago, I was just reminiscing. They got to be about the size of a peanut M&M.

Well here's my take. Typically there are two types of pest snails in the aquarium world, olive snails and trumpet snails. One can turn into hundreds in a matter of weeks. A lot of shops have them in their tanks, and therefore can easily transfer it to yours, on live plants, and even on fish, or a random egg or two from their water. They can live in the gravel for months and you don't even know you have them.

In your case, the only thing I can think of, because an aquatic snail to just appear one day and reproduce leads me to think it wasn't an outdoor land snail. They can live in water, but a lot of common ones lay their egg sacks outside of water. What can happen, even a completely dehydrated snail egg, that has been sitting for weeks or months at a time, and is rehydrated, it can STILL grow and release snails from that state. which is amazing. So my theory is, unless you cleaned the gravel with boiling water or a bleach solution, there was a dried egg or two in the gravel, rehydrating the tank and allowing it to sit made it hatch, and it began to asexually reproduce. That's really the only thing I can think of, unless as others said, an animal came into contact with a snail in a local pond, and somehow transferred it to your tank.

If this happens to anyone who has an existing aquarium, there are two good, natural methods to get rid of them. First one is get a half dozen bumblebee snails, aka assassin snails. They thrive on eating pest snails, and snail eggs. In a few weeks, they will eat the population down to just a few and will sustain a healthy population of under a dozen.

The second method, which isn't as effective in my experience, is to get a food clip on a suction cup, and attach a piece of dried seaweed to it. Do this every day, at the end of the night, pull it out and you'll find that a few dozen of these snails will be on there and you simply dispose of the seaweed leaf. This allows you to remove 25 to 40 of these snails a day, or potentially over 300 in a week. Unfortunately this method does not take care of egg sacks and will not eliminate your problem, which is why I like the first method better.

Chemicals exist and they are terrible for the health of your fish, your water quality and can cause more problems than they fix, always seek out natural methods first.

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