Although I look at my tank with my chinese loaches in each night, tonight is the first time I have seen what I presume are snails (see the 'not very good' photos). I have not added plants or anything for quite a few weeks now. There are two that I can see one about a centimeter long and the other slightly smaller and dark brown in colour. Are these normal snails, should I get rid of them, should I add them to my fancies tank (which is suffering from algae). I don't want to be run over with loads of them.








What size are they likely to grow to?

All advice gratefully received

they look fairly normal to me, stick them in your fancies tank, they will either eat algae or be eaten!

With goldfish you will never have a snail problem , ive never seen a single snail in my 4 footer since i set it up

I have this problem at the moment in my tropical tank and i have not added any plants too recently and my sisters tropical tank aswell i may use the cuccumber trick to catch them and then put them in my coldwater tank (which has a fair amount of algae.)

Jack

yeah these are the common pest snails you seem to get with plants etc all the time. they'll have been eggs when the plants were put in and probably hid until they became the size they are now. i know this because i purposely keep these in my small tank, and i got some as eggs. i thought the wcmm had eaten all the egss but it turned out they'd hatched. i didnt see them in any significant way until today when around 10 appeared all over the tank and made for the surface. by the look of things they were breeding and sure as fate ive now got eggs on the filter.
their parent died recently and was just under a cm long, but the ones that are breeding in my tank are half its size.
they will breed quickly and you wont know it because the eggs are really hard to see. they will lay them anywhere at all!
probably better to remove them with the cucumber trick or you might get over run. unless your a nut like me lol

Quote:

If I did the cucumber trick what do I do with the snails then?

Escargot anyone?

If you can identify them do some research and see if they are beneficial in anyway. Could give them away or perhaps feed them to another tank?

they dont really do much, they are quite good at eating algae off the plant leaves though. ive never seen them eat the plants at all. when theyre on the cucumber, either feed them to snail eating fish or kill them.
if you do decide to keep them try to watch out for the eggs, which are virtually transparent. if you can remove the eggs before they turn into snails, then it saves you having to kill a load of snails if you are not comfortable with it.
im breeding them to feed to my zebra loaches.

i have a real problem with snails... they have eaten the roots of one on my plants (small cabbae looking thing with green leaves and red under the leaves)

Weight some cucumber down over night and fish it out early morning, should find some snails gorging themselves on it. Repeat and you should keep them under control