The Puffer Forum

My snail tank has a decent population of planaria brown flatworms, in part because of overfeeding. Now at first I wasn't worried, because they seemed to be a nice cleanup crew, but I think they're eating snails eggs/babies too. The tank is filtered, weekly water changed, etc. I overfeed to help the snails breed fast enough to feed my f8. Is there a way to get rid of them? It seems very possible they're eating the snail progeny, as the snail population has decreased with the appearance of the planarian, so what are your suggestions?

Do you have substrate in there? Manual removal of as many possible, cutting down on feeding ( they will breed brilliantly with a good amount of feeding, over feeding is counter productive for reasons you have discovered) and step up your cleaning regime you will soon reduce their numbers to normal quantities. My snail tank gets the equivalent of around 150% weekly partials due to my OCD lol

+1 to bertie's comments. We all seem to go through phases of shooting ourselves in the foot, thinking that we are helping - when the opposite is really true.

Come to think of this, are there any small fishes that can be kept safely with the snails? That will also feast on planarias?

I can only imagine fish that eat planaria also find snail eggs/ young tasty

Unfortunately I do have substrate in the tank, about 1" deep. I've already started to cut down on feeding and up the amount of wc's. I have manually removed any planaria brave enough to venture from the subtrate, and will continue to until theyre mostly gone. I did once have a zebra danio in with the snails but removed it because, as bertie stated above, it ate the snail eggs/babies.