The Puffer Forum

Does ur f8 Crush the crap outa the Snail's shell or just suck the snail rite out....i noticed mine just sucks the snail outa the shell rather than crushing the whole shell....Wow the thing learns pretty quick....

If the snail's small enough, it'll crush the shell. Larger snails, they will suck the meat out. How are your water parameters doing? Keeping up w/those water changes?

Squash them before you put them in.


Kim

yea....amazingly enough, its good, i do a water change every three days or so for now, salinity dropped too, but not to what i want it at yet...prolly by next week, puffer is still strong as ever....still very curiouse to anything near the tank.. if i had a bigger tank, id get one more..im thinking of moving the puffer tank into my room away from the piranha's in the living room, and getting the puffer a 30 gallon long...not sure yet..

LittlePuff wrote:Squash them before you put them in.


Kim

BUT DO NOT DO IT WITH YOUR FINGERS!!!!!

a sharp shell can introduce some -SERIOUSLY- bad junk into your bloodstream.

Place the snail(s) on a small dish and cover with a paper napkin, then press down in a rolling motion with a spoon. The shell will crack easily without creating a huge mess.

its not a problem of how he eats it, either way he gets to it within seconds, its just that now he sucks the whole snail out and leaves the shell...before he used to rip apart the shell and then eat the snail..........thats all i was saying lol...

a sharp shell can introduce some -SERIOUSLY- bad junk into your bloodstream.

Like what exactly? How is this worse than cutting yourself with something else?

It is a tiny chance, but marine TB is an outside chance that I do not care to risk. I never put my hands in the tanks with any fresh cut or scrape. I use large heavy-duty stainless forceps to crush snails for small/new puffs.

I crush them with a small pair of stainless steel tweezers. I was trying to get one of my Congos to eat a very large shrimp one day. The shrimp spiked me in the hand with his tail. I cleaned the wound immediately but it still got a little nasty and painful.

Crushing the shell entirely doesn't leave enough "work" left for the puff to gnaw on to properly wear down it's teeth IMO.

I puncture the back of the snail's shell just a little bit using a small slotted screwdriver (if I'm feeding an adult, full grown ramshorn to my F8s). This "starter hole" is where the puffs usually begin gnawing on the shell, and using the hole they are eventually able to chew the hole shell in half (length-wise!) to get out all the meat.

If I don't do this, they'd just pull out whatever they can from the front of the shell, and are never really able to gnaw far enough to get all the meat out, leaving a bunch of meat wasted to rot unless I'm around to pull it out in time.

Wouildn't it be easier to just select smaller snails for feeding? Also, complete crushing is unnecessary, just cracking the shell is quite enough, although we do usually say "crush".

RTR wrote:Wouildn't it be easier to just select smaller snails for feeding? Also, complete crushing is unnecessary, just cracking the shell is quite enough, although we do usually say "crush".

It's funny you should say that, but I happen to have far too many adult ramshorns at the moment due to overbreeding. So I'm working on slimming the population down by feeding off a few (about 70) fully grown snails.

i was cleaning the piranha tank and i have this plastic or resin log type thing that tthe piranha usually hides under, well i took that out to vac up gravel and wat not underneath...and when i turned it upside down...ALOTA snails!, so hopefully they will get bigg and i can just pick them off and pop them in the puffer tank once every 2-3 days or somthing

Check the filter pads also.


Kim