Bring in the Assassins!
Packed in water and filter material.
My Assassin Snails arrived by post this morning. I’ve brought them in to hopefully clear up the snail infestation naturally. Apparently they assassinate other snails for food. Funny thing was, that there were five snails and one empty shell in the box. Was this their packed lunch? Anyway, I popped them into the darkened tank and left it a couple of hours before putting on the lights. They had all gone their separate ways and were spread out over the gravel and glass.
They are quite decorative compared to other snails and at least I have something to look at moving around in the tank. I can’t put any fish in yet until I finish “cycling” the water, which will take another couple of weeks. Hopefully, in the meantime, the Assassins will decrease the number of small snails that are appearing all over the place.
I also got some more small pices of bogwood today, and am soaking them in hot water. I’m not taking a chance with the varnish again so I’ll get as much stain out of them as I can by constantly replacing the hot water over the next couple of days before having a rearrangement of the plants.
Hopefully these striped carnivores will rid me of my infestation, or at least keep it under control.
Victoria Carter Memorial Page
you wont get rid of the snails while you have plants in the tank, the snails live on the plants.
take the plants out and put some lettuce in the tank overnight, the snails will be on the lettuce in the morning, so you take it out and replace it.
or buy some fish that eat snails eg clown loaches or gouramis
Loaches are a pest in a community tank I’ve found in the past. I’ll see how tha assassins get on first.
if you have a very bad infestation of snails, 4 or 5 assassins will make no difference, they are not eating machines. i have 6 large tanks and they all have 10 clown loaches which keep the snails under control to some extent. snails exist in nature and i have no problem if i see some in my tanks. i have never heard of clown loaches being a problem in a community tank. i think you are over complicating things by adding too many chemicals, just get the ph and temperature right and then put some fish in.
the snails wont kill them but the chemicals might.
I didn’t realise you meant clowns, I was thinking sucking loaches, which pester other fish. Clowns grow too big for the type of tank I have in mind though. The best fish I ever saw for snails was a puffer, but unfortunately they prefer slightly salty water.
have you stopped stufing about wif chemicals. snails and wood varnish and put some fish in yet ?
Had to put it on hold for the moment, been busy, done nothing. Will get back to it soon.
Is your East London forum no more, I cannot find it.
I am in dispute with the web hosting company at the moment and am trying to move the domain to another server. Until I do it will be giving error 503 messages. Sorry, but just try every week or so. I have no idea how long this will go on for.
Many thanks for your reply, I was getting a 503 error message but now I am getting a 403 Forbidden Error.
I am sorry to hear about your problem and hope you can sort out your dispute soon as I am sure many people are missing your forum. I found it a few weeks ago and was just about to join up because it is very interesting and informative.
regards Patrick