A few general questions about snail tanks.

[kcartwright856]

I'm having trouble operating the search function, so I thought I'd just make a new topic.

I have a 2 gallon hex tank that I'd love to use to breed snails for my future puffs. It will feature a mini heater and filter.

Can this tank be a miniature version of the puffer tank? Meaning, can I do a small layer of sand at the bottom and put a small piece of driftwood and a plant in? The idea of having it be similar to the puffer tank itself appeals to me.

Also, I'd like to have this on my desk, so I thought it might be interesting to have something else in there in addition to the snails. Is there anything appropriate for that? I read that a betta would basically pick everything off and defeat the purpose of a snail breeding tank. Would a fancy guppy be okay? I don't know anything about those.

If not a fish, perhaps shrimp? I'd like to have something in the water column to watch, but shrimp can be interesting as well. Plus, I assume that I could feed small shrimp offspring to the puffs.

Any information at this point is helpful!

[GBobNorth]

I have a 9 gallon hex growing snails right now, it's not even filtered, just a heater and a bubbler with a desk plant lamp clamped on the top. I got an Amazon Sword growing in it and it seems to be doing fine. I keep the water level low, actually about 7 gallons. Occasionally, I dump the sludge from the bottom of my puffers tank in after a few gallon cycle, but not too much. I currently have a bumper crop of ramshorn snails.

I had a hard time getting glass shrimp to live there, they'd be fine for a while and then die (snails don't look fast till you see them make a shrimp carcus disappear) I ended up getting 4 females with eggs, I guess they liked the plant, one by one they're eggs disappeared and I fed them to my GSP. That was about two months ago, I now have 4 baby shrimp that are hard to see but they were born in that tank and maybe they'll live long enough to breed and become food.

[scpion]

For pure snail breeding tank many of us chose to go bare bottom as they poop ALOT. So its easier to maintain. For glass/ghost shrimps, they eat snails... For cherry, U need a planted tank for them to breed properly. So if your main intention is to breed them, U can't really have them altogether in 1 tank.. IMO.

[Pufferpunk]

Sorry, until we get a site upgrade, the search function will not work.

[Puffer King]

whens the site upgrade happening ???

[JRC3]

Sorry, until we get a site upgrade, the search function will not work.

I normally use Firefox or Chrome but I have found that Explorer does allow me to search the forum. Now it is an older version 6 on an old desktop, and I don't know if that has anything to do with.

[LilGreenPuffer]

Snails will make a TON of waste, and shrimp need good water quality. A 2g won't be sufficient. If you want to breed snails in a 2g, you probably shouldn't have anything else in it. Besides, it's hard to keep such a small amount of water heated stably, and stable temperature is really important for fish and shrimp.

[kcartwright856]

PP: Oh, okay! I just didn't want to be redundant and make people answer the same questions all the time.

LGP: That makes sense! Will just the snails be okay in the 2g?

[LongGrain]

Right now I'm working on breeding ramshorn snails in my fluval edge (i know, kind of a waste of such a pretty tank) Im just using the stock fluval filter/heater/lights and they are doing ok. I've had them going in there for a few weeks now and alternate between getting new snails from the pet shop, and feeding them to my puffer, but I have a few adults that I'm not going to get rid of for breeding purposes and in the last couple days I just spotted 3 or 4 clutches of eggs. so far so good, I'm hoping I can raise a stable population to feed my gsp. Unfortunately I have gravel in the tank, and I'm scared to vacuum it because I don't want to suck up any baby snails I might have developing.

[LilGreenPuffer]

LGP: That makes sense! Will just the snails be okay in the 2g?

Snails can handle anything, even not-so-great water quality. They're just-add-food critters. As long as you keep up with the water changes, I don't think there'll be a problem.