The Puffer Forum

Since I'm not keeping my own snail tank (yet) and I'm able to get as many snails as I want at the local pet store for free, can I freeze some?

If I were to treat it like any other frozen shell fish I feed the puffs, wouldn't this work?

I dont see why not

I collect snails from the local beach & freeze them in little ice cube trays, so I can thaw out little batches as I need them.

bigfatfish wrote:I collect snails from the local beach & freeze them in little ice cube trays, so I can thaw out little batches as I need them.

good idea! My husband wad concerned about being inhumane. I think I would choose hypothermia over being ripped to shreds by an animal ten times my size!

some people put dying fish in the freezer to keep them from suffering

Ive just actually set up my 60 gallon tank with 3 huge African Land Snails in it to breed for my puffers although the other fish seem to love them too...I actually only set it up yesterday after visiting my local LFS to pick up 3-400 baby snails that have just hatched which i was told a few weeks ago i could have,i went there expecting to pick up 3-400 babies but never expected to bring back 3 huge snails..I actually got them for 4 quid as the girl actually wants one of my missus rabbits thats just been born,i said dont worry about paying me for the bunny as she has sorted me around 3 hundred snails before yesterday,she offered me the snails which i couldnt turn down,also she has someone whos bringing in another 3-4 hundred babies next week,sweet..Im hoping now i can get the bigguns breeding and have a decent supply of snails for my fish...
Having a snail tank will now allow the babies to get bigger which means bigger meals...Im well chuffed

Sorry to hijack your thread ,i suppose what i can add to th thread is if you set up the tank youll have a constant supply of tasty food for you fishes depending on what sort of snail you have..

IME a frozen thawed snail dissolves almost immediately on thawing. I'm not sure what the balance would be between food and simple water pollution. After I tried it I decided it was another NIMFT.

Hmmm... that's good to know. Who'da thunk?

I should have mentioned that my trial was some time back, with surplus largish red ramsforms (the veggie filters on the T.mbu and fahaka tanks tended to overstock - which would have led to reduced sizes, whch would be too small to interest those large fish). Freezing did not work for me, so I started selling them at the LFS.

FWIW - none of those fish would take small snails. There were common pond snails living in the T. mbu tank. It looks absurd to have too many snails out in the open in a snail-eater's tank. But neither species would touch any snail less than 1/2" when the fish were well grown (so much smaller to the mbu, but it was about the same cut-off size for both species). They just ignored the little ones.

I think you'll find salt water snails freeze much better - I bought a batch of escargots in chinatown once, and eventually froze them because they were all dying from cracks or other shell damage. These were about 1/2 to 3/4 of an inch.

Never tried freezing FW snails, but SW ones from the beach, certainly don't turn to mush on defrosting - still good & crunchy, with a nice bit of meat!!

To Europeans, escargot are land snails, Two of my sisters-in-law are French. One has entertained us with tales of helping her Alsacian grandmother with collecting snails for dinner during school holidays.

We get ours tinned, but they would be fairly $$ fish food. Also, you have to put them back into their shells, which might by-pass the crunch factor.

How is the tinned escargot? I haven't had the wallet space to try them. The only snail I can afford these days is tinned scungilli, but it's quite rubbery.

I hadn't known they only call land snails escargot, in the US they seem to call any eating snail that no matter what the size or where it came from. I knew scungilli is only large saltwater snails but then both sides of my family are at least half Italian. Makes sense that the French are also more precise.

We have only used a particular French tinned products, which are apparently the same species as those Marie collected as a child. The texture is not as good as fresh/live, but is not rubbery - that would be gross. They are not inexpensive, unfortunately. Those are definitely special appetizers. Only once have we used them as entrees (the way she remembers them as a child), and that was a real blow-out special meal. Also it was a definite garlic overdose.