# Productive snails- food related ?



## Fishfur (Mar 4, 2012)

I've always liked snails. Not sure why, just something about them appeals to me. Have tried a few times to get them to reproduce, without a whole lot of success. One egg case partially hatched, one time. Then this past winter, lost so much livestock due to having no heat.

Anyway, I still had some Spixi snails left, which are in a 5G with the fan shrimps. They have been laying new egg masses at least once a week for a month now, and I have a pile of tiny little Spixis all over this tank. And a new batch of snails have been living in my frog tank, including Mysteries, nerites, 3 very large Tylo' types I can't recall the name of, two Pagodas and a type of MTS that is a dull olive colour and larger than the more common ones with stripes and spots. There was also a pair of rabbit snails, which are being sold. The rabbit snails started it off, producing at least 3 babies in just a couple of months.

Then the mysteries started, currently there are 3 egg cases laid, and I am hopeful they will hatch ok. The frog tank has a sliding glass cover, and they laid on the tank wall just beneath the top. Even though the sliding glass is partially open at each end to allow air to pass over and cool the water, it's still fairly humid under there, so hopefully, enough to keep the eggs viable.

I am not certain what has prompted this frenzy of reproduction.. [I even had a pair of rice fish spawn the other day], but it started shortly after I began feeding a new sinking food, about two months ago. The snails all behave as if they are starving, hastening to grab as much as they can the instant the pellets hit the tank. Shortly after the pellets hit bottom, every snail will be on top of one of the piles. I drop them in a few places so they don't all try for the same pile of food. Even the fish have been going after these pellets, though they are not bottom feeders.

It's made by Cobalt. It's a spirulina pellet containing a probiotic of some type. Simple tube shaped extrusion in blue and green, and no matter how much I feed it's always entirely gone by next day. The snails have been growing at a truly impressive rate and this is easily visible on their shells. They're mating almost daily. Even their colours have intensified, one that was a fairly ordinary shade of blue is now so dark it looks black, with red orange spots on the breathing tube. Be interesting to see if I get more eggs, and very rewarding if the eggs hatch safely.

Btw, I also give them veggies now and then, cooked, and while they do eat them, they don't respond to them in anything like the way they do to the Cobalt pellets. Once I get my larger tanks back up, I will be feeding these pellets to my bottom feeding fishes too, just to see if it has anything like the same effect on them as it has had on the snails. I have also noticed that the few small shrimp in the fan shrimp tank go for these pellets, which I feed to the Spixis. I've seen cherries and amanos both swimming while holding a pellet tightly. They dissolve very quickly, so the shrimp usually manage to hang onto their prizes until they can eat them.

Never have used a fish food that claimed to be probiotic before, and being for fish, they for sure weren't made for inverts as such, but the effect has certainly been remarkable.


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## randy (Jan 29, 2012)

Interesting. The reproduction could be related to temperature?


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## Fishfur (Mar 4, 2012)

Could be, perhaps. My misfortune that the warmer temps coincide with about when I started with the new food.. nothing like multiple variables to confuse things.

For now, all tanks are small and in my bedroom, which is usually very warm. They have been up to 90F, even with fans running. One fan just quit this morning, but the cooler days we've been having help.. temps down in the low 70s the past couple of days. 

Just have to watch and see what happens, I guess. If the reproduction slows down with some cooler temps, that will be a clue.


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