The Puffer Forum

Hi
I have fed my F8 ramshorns ever since we got her and I have a good breeding tank going! In the past I have dumped the snails in the tank and my fish has eaten them immediately or the odd one she has missed has died in the salt water and i have found floating a day or two later. Well she must have missed a snail or two and somehow they seem to have adapted to the brackish water and I now seem to have a few largish ramshorns and a few small ones too living in her tank ( I think they are living in a hollow log I have as it seems full of snail poo when i clean the tank out. I think she isn't eating them as she needs a trip to the dentist soon, but my question is how are they surviving in brackish water? have they adapted or mutated somehow??
The SG is about 1.004 as it always has been, and I am just suprised that they are surviving in the brackish water!!
I guess after I clip her teeth , she is going to have a wonderful time catching them all lol
Regards
Sue

I'd think it was the sudden increase of salinity which killed most of your snails put in the tank and not the higher salinity itself. Once I gradually increased salinity in a qt tank from zero to marine over several weeks. All 5 ramshorn snails I had in there from the beginning survived until 1.016. They didn't die, I took them out, while installing a skimmer. They even grew faster than their brothers/sisters in the snail tank, but that may be due to the algae in the qt brackish tank and the higher hardness of the water.

Ramshorn snails can live and propagate (found loads of eggs and some small snails) in brackish water, but that may not be their natural habitat and so it possibly cannot be reccomended. In addition there maybe several different species or even genera of "ramshorn snails", which differ with regard to accepted salinity.

I think the higher PH and disolved mineral count in brackish benfits most snails which can adapt to the salt. Sometime I would like to do an experiment keeping the hardness etc as high as in a brackish tank but with freshwater, I think a snail explosion would result.

My snail breeding tanks (FW) have aragonite substrates.

I also keep aragonite substrate in my snail-breeding tanks. As of recently, I have been using my main community tank as a snail propagation facility, so I just added aragonite and crushed oyster shells (sold at the pet store in the bird section for next-to-nothing) to the substrate.

The snails are just thriving! At the peak of this experiment, I had counted 280 snails (!) in a 30-gallon tank after having introduced just between 25 and 35 after just two or three months!