The Puffer Forum

I have a 5 gallons tank containing only snails. I clean every week at the same time has my puffer aquarium, with the same water but in a seperate container so there is no salt in the water, I also use Prime as a water conditioner to remove chlorine. I've made a foam filter for the submersible pump close to a year ago to replace the prepacked filters that kept clogging up and overflowing on the floor after 2 weeks ( even while cleaning them in the middle of that time)

I've been doing this routine the same for the last year, but now for the last two months, they stopped breeding. Now I have only 5 left, and some tiny ones, I don't give anymore to the puffer or for sure I'm running out of them... They just slowly die, maybe one a week or two weeks.

Is there a certain time of year they don't breed no more??? Should I get more to hopefully create more "romance"????

If they'd all died at the same time, there might be a problem with the water, but I change 85% of the water weekly.

I've heard that two things make them more inclined to breed - warm water and plenty of food.
Have they got a lot to eat? Also, maybe pop a cheap heater in there, if you haven't got one.

If you noticed white pitting and erroding of the shells when they died off then they might not have been getting enough calcium

They have one or two leafs of salad (depending on size) so they got plenty. For heat, how hot should I keep it??? Some do turn whitish after dying, how can I give them more calcium???

You can test your tap water for calcium most tap will have enough. But if not some people use cuttlebone. Just be carefull of your ph when using cuttlebone. Others make snelllo ( snail jello) there are recepies available online but the main ingredients are baby food and tums (for calcium)

Welch4 wrote:You can test your tap water for calcium most tap will have enough. But if not some people use cuttlebone. Just be carefull of your ph when using cuttlebone. Others make snelllo ( snail jello) there are recepies available online but the main ingredients are baby food and tums (for calcium)

Lol I had to immediately google "snello". The recipe seems neat but I'm sure tums would cloud water unnecessarily. I have about 2 lbs of dry base rock each in (2) 5.5g tanks, one with Ramshorn and the other with Pond snails. Would the presence of the base rock provide enough calcium for the snails long-term like cuttlebone would?

So that question just sent me into the bowels of the diehard snailer world. So here goes.

If you are reffering to the white-ish base rock, and not lava rock, it is Calcium carbonate. This will provide a source of calcium to the tanks water untill the water ph hits a high enough level and the rock will cease or slow it's rate of dissolution.

For our purposes I can only speculate that this would be sufficient as I can not seem to find a hard answer for an ideal calcium level for snails. This is partly due to each species having different needs. But a good indicator of a lack of calcium would be shell cracks, fissures, white discoloring, or full on erosion. The general consensus of the snailer community looks to be trying to get the highest concentrations of calcium in both the water and food without crashing the tank due to ph and alkalinity swings.

Im actualy considering alot of the methods and techniques that are mentioned. Outside of producing sufficient spawns, the calcium boost means a stronger full shell which inturn means crunchier puff food. And this is why we all breed them in the first place.

Thanks for doing all the digging for me. Yes it is that off-white colored base rock that reefers use in saltwater setups.( http://www.drsfostersmith.com/product/p ... atid=24528) that brand in particular. I just got both tanks set up and stocked this weekend while my 33 long is cycling. What kind of production can I be expecting with room temperature controlled tanks 68-78F?

An easy way to know if you have hard water is whether or not you get a lot of limescale built up on the walls of your kettle when/if you don't use a filter.

I don't really know what the ideal temperature is, but I do know (from first-hand experience and from reading some studies) that snails are crazy resilient when it comes to temperature so I wouldn't worry to much.

If you haven't got a spare heater knocking about, then you can buy these ones that are just a kind of flat plastic rectangle which are cheap but don't have adjustable temperature.

+1 to bed. Heater is not nessesary but will definitely help your production rate.

Whatever happens, be sure to let us know the results! I'm always interested to hear what works for people.

Well, I didn't have time to do any of the changes you told me to yet, with christmas coming around been lacking in time... Even to clean the aquariums, I usually do them on thesdays and yesterday I had a work supper so I planned on doing it this morning, but when I looked inside the snail aquarium there is some "foam" on the bottom of it, sorta attached to the rocks...

I feel like I'm loosing control of it even though I'm replacing 85% of the water evey week, I tested the water before changing it:
PH=7.5
Ammonia= 0
Nitrate= 5
Nitrite= 0

Here's some pictures, think this is killing my snails???

It looks kind of gelatinous from the pics. Is there any fuzz on that stuff?. Either way id try to vac that out but i have never come across that before.

That's what I did, we'll see if it comes back or not, it was loose on the gravel, like uneaten food or something foaming up, but there was a lot of it... and 2 other snails died, so now I got only 3 left...