# Empty assassin snails shels, Please help



## ppaskova (Apr 27, 2010)

Hi Guys

Lately I started to discover empty assassin snails shells in both of my tanks. I have two tanks 10Gl - shrimp only, and 30Gl - fish only. Before when I had that issue a few years ago I had planaria in my tank. Since then I got rid of it. And I have a lot of assassins in both of my tanks, especially in 10Gl and they look and move around fine. I don't have any other snails in my tanks since they ate everything else. I still have them multiplying as I see little ones as well. I also know that they are very hardy and I do not have any issues with both of my tanks, all the fish and shrimps in them are healthy and multiplying. I don’t have any fish or shrimps in my tanks that like to eat snails. Any idea why I'm discovering empty assassin shells ?


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## pyrrolin (Jan 11, 2012)

possible they are dieing of old age?


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## Ciddian (Mar 15, 2006)

I have a few assassin snail shells around too, I still have a bit of adults and some small ones. The numbers never really seem to go down. 

I did notice a drop in snails when I wasn't feeding enough. I didn't realize the main fish in the tank was over eating the pellets. 

Are the shells looking odd or anything?

The shrimps are still okay with the snails? What did you treat with for planaria? Or nothing at all?


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## colio (Dec 8, 2012)

It is possible you experienced an unsustainable population explosion in the tank, in that many assassin snails were born and there was not enough food for them to eat. So now you are loosing the excess population. If they killed off all other snails, a major food source for them, they may be declining from starvation.


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## ppaskova (Apr 27, 2010)

Ciddian said:


> I have a few assassin snail shells around too, I still have a bit of adults and some small ones. The numbers never really seem to go down.
> 
> I did notice a drop in snails when I wasn't feeding enough. I didn't realize the main fish in the tank was over eating the pellets.
> 
> ...


Some shells are looking adults, some looking medium size like teenagers and some are cracked as somebody tried to eat them. When I had Planeria I used fertalizone to get rid of them.


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## pyro (Dec 6, 2010)

Might be a silly question but will assassins eat assassins if they don't have a food source?


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## ppaskova (Apr 27, 2010)

pyro said:


> Might be a silly question but will assassins eat assassins if they don't have a food source?


Not to my knowledge. And they get enough food as I drop some hard food daily specialty for them.


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## Fishfur (Mar 4, 2012)

Most carnivorous snails like assassins will predate on their own species if no other prey is available. They're members of the whelk family, and meat is what they want. They don't really eat plants or any plant matter, but will take algae tabs if nothing else is around, as it they do have protein in them. Usually he slowest and smallest of their own kind will be the first to go once the prey snails are gone. 

They are carnivores, and they need the meat inside the juicy snail. If other prey species have gone, they will likely prey on each other until some sort of population balance is reached. Might want to give them MTS snails. MTS are not very noticeable in most tanks, they most often come out at night. They breed fast, but do no harm to anything at all, and provide an ongoing source of snail prey for assassins.

I have spixis, they also eat other snails, and they eat each other too, even in the egg mass, the first hatched eat the smaller ones that are not hatched yet.

You might try selling some of the younger snails before they are eaten. If you have enough, even some stores would take them for credit usually, if they don't already have some. 

If you don't want to have MTS or other prey snails in the tank, you can also try providing small bits of meat for the assassins a few times a week. A small ceramic feeding dish would help keep it all in one spot, so you can remove leftovers more easily.

With the numbers of Assassins you have , any new prey snail added now is not likely to survive long enough to reproduce in any great numbers anyway. But MTS would be a good one, if only because they release babies at the water surface at night, where they get some time to hide or crawl down to burrow into the substrate.. which is where they spend much of their time anyway.

But if you don't want any other snails, try some meat.. no pellet or tablet is anything like real meat, even if it says it is for carnivores. You could even dab a tiny bit of calcium powder on the meat for shell health, Powdered clean eggshell works for this, or gypsum from the Chinese market. Snip a tiny slit into the pieces and use a toothpick to dab calcium in the slit, so it won't wash away so fast in the water. Won't do any harm to water parameters, not enough of it to make much difference. 

Just as example; I noticed one of my newly acquired Amano shrimps had died the other day. There were near a dozen ramshorns swarming the corpse, to the point I had trouble identifying what they were eating for awhile. 

If ordinary omnivorous snails get this excited over a freshly dead shrimp, I'm betting your assassins would happily swarm raw meat, beef heart, steak, bit of raw shrimp meat, etc. Give no more than they'll consume overnight, remove any leftovers.


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## ppaskova (Apr 27, 2010)

Thank you very much for your info. Very helpful. I'll use agile pellets as I don't want to put real meet there. The only strange thing that I noticed is that when I have dead fish in the tank (not that often) they are not so interested in it, why ?


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## Fishfur (Mar 4, 2012)

Good question, and I have no idea why they don't go for dead fish. Perhaps they like meat better than fish ? I can appreciate you not wanting to feed meat, but tiny bits of it, say, no larger than your baby finger nail and less than 1/8 inch thick would not be able to do much, if any, harm to the water conditions even if none of it was eaten.

Might be worth trying one tiny piece to see if the snails respond to it or not. If not, case closed, if they do, could be a weekly treat sort of thing.

Assassins are one snail I have never kept.. the spixis I have are more than efficient enough at killing off other snails, so I've never had the need to keep assassins. And I have a couple of small Asian clams again, so I'd not want Assassins in with them, they might well drill the clam shells. Spixis don't drill shells, they just grab the occupant's foot and eat them that way.


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