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Snails carrying disease?
Posted: Wed Sep 15, 2010 11:28 am
by ~reefchik~
I've come to the conclusion that snails may be more disease vectors than I ever thought
Story: Lately I'm buying snails (ponds and ramshorns) to keep up with feeding my puffers since my breeding population isn't keeping pace. I have 3 tanks set up with snails in them at this time.
So, I saw some really lovely Tequila Sunrise guppies a few weeks ago and bought them on something of a whim to add nice color to the 10g where I have shrimp and snails both. Well, only one female has survived. Each fish developed a hemorrhagic looking disease of some sort, and by the time I found it, they were on their last leg (or fin). Males went first.
Now I guess it could be that they were crap fish to start with (my first Petsmart fish purchases, btw) but I wonder. I also had a carnival goldfish that I was holding for a week or so for my granddaughter (who won it) until they could set up a tank for it. It was in a 10 with several snails, too. The GF died soon after they took it home, with some nasty black spots all over it.
Granted, the carnival GF may have had too many stresses, but it looked healthy as heck when we brought it home. 3 weeks later, it's dead.
Does anyone else see a pattern here?
Re: Snails carrying disease?
Posted: Wed Sep 15, 2010 11:49 am
by jmiller
I have never been able to keep guppies.
Re: Snails carrying disease?
Posted: Wed Sep 15, 2010 12:40 pm
by RTR
Commercial livebearers, especially from the mass marketers, have been tragically overbred for many years and pitifully weak with paired recessive genes which serve nicely as time bombs in most hobby tanks.
How long , if at all, did you quarantine the guppies? If they went straight into an already mixed tank, there really are no valid conclusions to be drawn from your experience, but the most likely idea is that the guppies themselves carried the lethal hemorrhagic disease. Such issues are not at all uncommon in any fish bred commercially in SE Asia.
If you are trying to rear snails as feeders, why are you using mixed tanks? Monoculture of snails is effective. Co-housing such with shrimp may well be providing immature snails or the egg masses themselves with food for shrimp rather than for puffers. Potentially containinating your food supply with un-QT'd new fish is putting the safety of your food supply at risk. Snails cannot themselves carry many fish pathogens or parasites, but the presence of such in the water with the snails or shrimp can certainly ease transmission of those potential issues or even killers to the fish you want tho feed.
It might be a good idea to reexamine your food-rearing practices overall.
Re: Snails carrying disease?
Posted: Wed Sep 15, 2010 5:56 pm
by ~reefchik~
RTR wrote:Commercial livebearers, especially from the mass marketers, have been tragically overbred for many years and pitifully weak with paired recessive genes which serve nicely as time bombs in most hobby tanks.
You'd think I'd know that having been in the pet biz some years ago, but then again I'm uncommonly naive at times when I see seemingly healthy fish in LFS. Sheesh.....
How long , if at all, did you quarantine the guppies?
I didn't quarantine them at all since there are no other fish in that tank. If they went straight into an already mixed tank, there really are no valid conclusions to be drawn from your experience, but the most likely idea is that the guppies themselves carried the lethal hemorrhagic disease. Such issues are not at all uncommon in any fish bred commercially in SE Asia.
Hmmm..no knowing where they came from. Good point.
If you are trying to rear snails as feeders, why are you using mixed tanks?
I researched if it would be feasible before doing it and saw nothing to indicate it wouldn't work. I'm simply trying to save space and energy 
Monoculture of snails is effective. Co-housing such with shrimp may well be providing immature snails or the egg masses themselves with food for shrimp rather than for puffers. Potentially containinating your food supply with un-QT'd new fish is putting the safety of your food supply at risk. Snails cannot themselves carry many fish pathogens or parasites, but the presence of such in the water with the snails or shrimp can certainly ease transmission of those potential issues or even killers to the fish you want tho feed.
Ok, I can really see the reasoning behind this; I had not thought of that possibility.
It might be a good idea to reexamine your food-rearing practices overall.
So, in a 10g tank I have ghost shrimp, cherry shrimp, pond snails and ramshorns. No fish, since the last remaining guppy is now in a QT medicated tank. Are you saying I'll be better off separating each of these into their own tanks? My husband may want to call you later
J/K...he thinks I have too many tanks as it is.
Re: Snails carrying disease?
Posted: Wed Sep 15, 2010 6:04 pm
by J-P
my cherries don't touch the pond snails or the eggs. I don't know about ghosties though.. they are quite a bit bigger.
Re: Snails carrying disease?
Posted: Wed Sep 15, 2010 7:24 pm
by Lil' Swimz$
From what I THOUGHT I knew, snails and shrimp can carry internal parasites. I was never given a solid answer of how to treat them if they did, but one mentioned "No Planaria" as it would kill worms. I have no idea about other meds, I always wanted to know if I could...
Re: Snails carrying disease?
Posted: Thu Sep 16, 2010 11:21 am
by side19
i know ghost shrimp will eat snail eggs. my friend has a 5 gallon set up for puffer food and he noticed a pregnant female shrimp eating some of the pond snail eggs in his tank.
Re: Snails carrying disease?
Posted: Thu Sep 16, 2010 11:40 am
by ~reefchik~
Well if I need to set up separate tanks, I know they can be fairly small for these guys. I still have a 5g tank that used to be a sump which I could use for a breeder tank. And I'm betting I can raise snails just fine in a large plastic critter carrier, too. I like more water volume since you are supposed to feed snails liberally to keep them breeding - so I suppose I have to consider that. I still have a fair amount of space in the basement to set up a couple more small tanks.
Re: Snails carrying disease?
Posted: Thu Sep 16, 2010 11:56 am
by RTR
Red cherry shrimp are one of the most if not the most innocuous shrimp species. Amanos and Ghosts and others of similar or larger scale are not particularly good for other inverts, especially egg-depositing snails. IME, Singapore/wood shrimp are as harmless as RCs,or even ore so. But they are not feeders - too pricey,need BW for breeding (as do Amanos and several Ghost types).
Parasites tend to be pretty host-specific and adapted. They have a very hard time switching from one phylum to another.
Shrimp, crayfish, and snail parasites generally cannot infect vertebrates with one major exception - "black spot disease" in fish is the result of encysted forms of digenetic flukes, and that multi-stage parasite is transmitted by Apple and other largish snails reared in the wild in the tropics. If your snails are captive bred, they do not have those bugs. The wild target organism for that parasite is fish-eating birds.
Re: Snails carrying disease?
Posted: Fri Sep 17, 2010 2:18 am
by ~reefchik~
Ok, that's all very interesting, and puts my mind at ease somewhat about the snails. Which are all captive bred. The ponds and ramshorns I got from one Aqua Bid vendor and another on eBay. The cherry shrimp are from eBay as well. Ghost shrimp I get here locally in Ohio. I keep seeing conflicting reports on other forums as to whether the cherry shrimp will be able to successfully breed with ghosts in there. I guess I'll have to get the ghosts out and put them all in their own species tank.
I think you are slowing making a convert out of this ole' time community tank gal, RTR. I'm beginning to understand why you don't mix your fish or critters.
Having said that, I bought 6 new feeder guppies tonight and they went into the 10g QT medicated tank with my one remaining TS guppy female, who seems perfectly healthy. I just couldn't see buying any other more expensive type of fish to keep that tank cycled, and since they are now being medicated I suppose the chances of them surviving are better than they might otherwise have been.
Re: Snails carrying disease?
Posted: Fri Sep 17, 2010 12:03 pm
by RTR
I admit to using guppies to get some puffers into tank eating mode when they are new to me. My T. mbu was slow to take non-living food for quite some time, but eventually got converted to fishmarket items. he had outgrown guppies long before that though. I have kept a strain of plain guppies for decades, I used them as part of conditioning for certain Cichlids from before I had many puffers.
I am finally doing away with that tank - I almost never use them anymore since i am not keeping any more long-lived predators.
Other than workers (which some folks do not approve of), all of my tanks are species tanks. The fish get to show their more normal behavior that way.
Re: Snails carrying disease?
Posted: Fri Sep 17, 2010 3:13 pm
by ~reefchik~
Other than workers (which some folks do not approve of), all of my tanks are species tanks. The fish get to show their more normal behavior that way.
May I ask? What are "workers"?
Sure makes sense to me to breed your own feeders, no matter what they are. It's the only way to have some quality assurance.
Re: Snails carrying disease?
Posted: Fri Sep 24, 2010 12:35 am
by ~reefchik~
I got in some large plastic tanks with foam filters to set up for my shrimp.
I checked out the snail + cherry shrimp tank tonight and there are baby shrimp in there and a TON of tiny snails!
Finally, success on some front. I'll take it
Re: Snails carrying disease?
Posted: Fri Sep 24, 2010 11:44 am
by RTR
Culturing common snails and some shrimp is pretty easy. They will be more productive in separate containers, not mixed together.
"Workers" are fish or inverts keep to help with cleaning tasks. These can include such things as various suckermouth catfish (Otocinclus catfish for diatom and soft green algae, especially in planted tanks, or other small suckermouths such as dwarf peckoltia or dwarf Panaque or the smallest bristlenose cats for general glass and substrate surface clean-up), or snails or certain shrimp in tanks where they would not be food for the fish.
HTH
Re: Snails carrying disease?
Posted: Fri Sep 24, 2010 12:03 pm
by Adria
I doubt this will be helpful but we have had a heavily planted snail breeding tank running for nearly a year now (20 gal long); in the beginning we had snails and ghost shrimp. Then added cherry shrimp. We noticed the cherry shrimp would hold babies but the population never seemed to increase. The snails were not doing very well either. So, we took out the ghost shrimp (our fahaka was small enough at the time that 4 of them were a meal...oh how I miss those days, haha) and within a few months the cherry shrimp population exploded! The snails followed suit. The tank has been doing VERY well ever since.