The Puffer Forum

Does it matter on the breed and origin of snails in which you feed to a puffer?

Pond and ramshorn snails are best. Avoid the Malaysian trumpet snails as they are too hard for your puffer and could possible crack their teeth plates.

Great, thanks!
All my LFS are out of baby snails so I was looking on aquabid and wanted to make sure before I purchased some.

Take a look at the plants your LFS has ... if you look closely you can probably get some free hitch hikers

I usually get them for free at my LFS, but I pretty much cleaned them out last week, and my snail eggs just started hatching so it'll still be a few weeks before they will reach breeding size.

and feeding size.

so far the only snails I've seen at any of the LFS's in my area are the MTS...bummer!

also...I have a feeder tank (5gallons) I'm trying to breed snails in but the nitrite and nitrate levels are off the chart. I'm still cycling that tank so I'm guessing it's still in progress (been going for 1 week now) but I'm worried that those snails will be toxic for my puffers if they're living in such high nitrite and nitrate. Should I discard these snails I have so far and wait till it's got the correct parameters? (Ammonia has just started being 0 and ph is about 8.1 - I have a little plecostomus in there that I throw algae pellets in for)

thanks tons

The "pest" snails (common pond, ramshorns, and MTS) are not affected by unoxidized nitrogen metabolites (ammonia. nitrite) or by the final oxidized form, nitrate, at the levels which are toxic for vertebrates (fish, etc.). Any of those critters can actually be used to cycle a tank (I have done so as a test, but only with the first two which we use for feeders) but large numbers of snails are needed to match the bioload of fish.

If the feeder snails are moved without water, or are rinsed with removed tank water, they should be harmless to the fish fed with them.

HTH

RTR wrote:... Any of those critters can actually be used to cycle a tank...

Made me think of how I keep about 8 or so adult ramshorns in my QT tank to KEEP it cycled. Also good because new fish sometimes won't eat right away or in the example of a little DP I picked up 2 months ago he had to learn to eat bloodworms and would let some pieces fall to the bottom...The snails are more than happy to clean up.

sooo speaking of snails again... is it possible to get a certain size snail that the puffers won't attack? I have 3 f8's. I am getting a nice bit of algae growing and it's irritating me..lol. Big snails survive puffers?

good luck i put in a couple huge snails and they killed him in a couple minutes

I had the same algae problem and Seven told me about nerite snails. She told me "olive" nerites, but my LFS only had "zebra" ones. Same end result though. They have hard enough shells that the puffers can break them, and they have a trap door to protect the soft bodies. Also, they can live in either FW, BW or SW. They were a tad expensive, I paid about $34 US for 8 of them, but man, the tank was almost algae free by the end of the day. I plan on taking 2 out of each tank for a total of 4 to acclimate them to the SW tank I now have.

HTH!!