Colomesus in blackwater biotope aquarium

[nmonks]

Hello all,

I'm playing with the idea of creating a blackwater biotope aquarium. Wood, peat, sandy substrate, no plants. The water is dark, very acidic (pH 5-6) and would have little to no hardness. I'd use rainwater (which, in England, I have in abunance!!!).

I'm curious whether Colomesus asellus would do well in such conditions. I know that they occur in the Rio Negro, but I'm not sure whether they are migratory or spend their entire lives in blackwater rivers. Any thoughts?

Cheers,

Neale

[RTR]

Well, they have been captured in such, but I don't know enough about their ecolgy in the wild to guess. I have never kept them in other than at least moderately hard tap water. I suspect it will show off their colors/patterns quite nicely.

If you do this, keep us posted - this could make a very nice tank. You may be vacuuming out a lot of snail shell fragments. My old puffer tanks tend to have a detectable though smallish percentage of the substrate as crushed shell fragments, which sort to the top of the substrate in the gravel vacuum tube, but do not get carried out by the flow unless you get the tube filled with substrate. Then of course it clogs the Python at the tap. I have considered several times making a large wash bottle to splice in-line to capture such, but never done so.

[nmonks]

It's interesting you mention snails. My SAPs do (eventually) eat pond snails, which they seem to pull out of their shells. But they seem also to have eaten the Malayan livebearing snails. I used to have hundreds in the sand, and while the adults are there, the juveniles are virtually absent. I see maybe one a week. My SAPs get fed once a day, and by the evening, they peck at the plants and sand, and I believe they're eating the Malayan livebearers.

As far as I can tell, they take only the tiniest ones, maybe 1 mm long, but that's enough to cull the population and, incidentally, seems to keep their teeth worn down. I know it isn't recommended, but letting nature take its course is really the only option here. If you have a planted tank with a sandy substrate, Malayan snails are, in my opinion, essential because they prevent anaerobic decay in the sand better than anything else.

Cheers,

Neale

[RTR]

I think that I am partly to blame for the general avoidance of MTS with the smallish puffers. Back in the dark ages (pre-clove oil) I had issues with broken incissors with F-8s and SAPs especially. Then I used mostly sand substrates as well. So I became an anti-MTS for puffers crusader of sorts. Now I genertally do avoid them in puffer tanks. When I have SAPs they get small common pond and small ramshorns only, and I avoid introducing MTS to their tanks (not always easy when stealing plants from the other, non-puffer, planted tanks). My SAPs do learn to crush the small snails before maturity, but largish pond snails do get slurped.