Current Events > Can anyone explain this weird fish tank thing?

(+) Yeah! (+)

When I was a kid I had a little fish tank with a couple of little fish. After like maybe a year they had all died so we drained the fish tank and left it outside. Like a year or two later I wanted to try owning fish again so we filled up the tank and let the water cycle for a couple of weeks. But then we found a snail in the tank one day. Then a few dozen. And then eventually every square inch of the tank was filled with these little tan shelled snails.

We didnt live near any bodies of water for snails to like... lay eggs in the tank, so what could have happened?

---

Birds pooped in your tank. Snails in that poop

---

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMjQ3hA9mEA

---

I'm confused on your question. You had a snail in your tank filled with water and you are wondering why 1 snail turned into 50? Snails can reproduce monthly and lays roughly 85 eggs each time.

---

Jiggy101011 posted...

I'm confused on your question. You had a snail in your tank filled with water and you are wondering why 1 snail turned into 50? Snails can reproduce monthly and lays roughly 85 eggs each time.

We never had snails. They just appeared out of nowhere.

---

SaltyWet posted...

Birds pooped in your tank. Snails in that poop

No. what birds are eating aquatic snails? unless you live by a river or something. unlikely to survive a bird too. they arne't seeds.

did you add anything to the tank from another tank or the store? decoration, plants, gravel. they could have snuck in that way. especially teh plants.

maybe they could have gotten in on the fish but i doubt it...

---

Chicken posted...

We never had snails. They just appeared out of nowhere.

So you are confused why there was a snail in your backyard that made its way to your tank?

---

Mezcla posted...

No. what birds are eating aquatic snails? unless you live by a river or something. unlikely to survive a bird too. they arne't seeds.

did you add anything to the tank from another tank or the store? decoration, plants, gravel. they could have snuck in that way. especially teh plants.

maybe they could have gotten in on the fish but i doubt it...

The only thing that was in the tank was that gravel stuff from the first time it was occupied, but that was sitting outside in the tank over the winter (we get brutally cold winters here, dry too). We just filled it with water from the hose and had the tank sit in my room until they appeared.

---

Jiggy101011 posted...

So you are confused why there was a snail in your backyard that made its way to your tank?

There was zero life in the tank when we filled it back up.

---

Maybe a snail laid eggs in the hose, maybe a snail laid eggs on the gravel while it was outside

---

i used to have a heavily planted tank that i had direct CO2 injection and i monitored the nutrient levels for the plants. it was cool until algae took over and i stopped caring.

but i had a ton of snails pop up in there too. i dind't actually mind. they ate all the algae growing on the leaves and the glass that i couldn't get to and anything the fish couldnt eat.

you can control them via how much food is in the tank. if theres a lot of algae,leftover food, etc. theres going to be a lot of snails. if you control your algae by not having an excess in nitrogen in the tank, which the plants did help with, and you dont over feed your fish to the point where they dont eat everything, then you wont have a lot of snails.

right now in my new planted tank, i have lots of malaysian trumpet snails that are kept to a low population because theres not a lot going on in that tank. i have one betta fish in there at eats all the food and i dont do anything but pump co2 in to the tank.

---

Can you take a picture, preferably close up, of some of these snails? Are they real tiny, like the size of a BB or smaller?

---

ProfessorKukui posted...

https://www.livescience.com/15079-snails-survive-eaten-excreted-birds.html

well ill be a monkeys uncle.

IT WAS THE BIRDS

---

Eww

---

MabusIncarnate posted...

Can you take a picture, preferably close up, of some of these snails? Are they real tiny, like the size of a BB or smaller?

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

---

Turns out I was right all along, as usual.

---

sounds like a nightmare

---

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.

---

Not the best pic, but i'm assuming this is what you had, they can get to the size of an m&m like you described.



---

God I fucking love snails. Love darts!
---