Snails in the Fish Tank

For years we didn’t have a case of snails in our tank, the only incident when we received a few fish and some plastic plants from a friend. A few months ago when we bought a couple live plants there must have been a drifter.

We have a rather large chocolate plecostomus who doesn’t do a very good job of cleaning the algae on the sides of the tank. Instead, he hides under a piece of wood we have on the bottom. So when I saw a snail in the tank cleaning rather efficiently, and only a few days after getting some new live plants, I thought, “that’s nice, but I don’t think so,” and scooped it up and put it in the whiskey barrel pond on the deck. Every day for a week went by and I would find one or two dutifully eating the algae, and every day I would scoop them up and put them in the pond. Eventually my partner got tired of them and decided to simply squish any that he saw, with the argument that it would be good fish food. Sure enough, the fish seemed to love escargot as much as I do, though I still prefer mine with butter and parsley.

It got to the point that we were both squishing a few a day or every other day and so my partner decided to do a little research to find out what predator fish he could put into the tank that would be okay for the other fish, but eat the impending snail population from getting completely out of control. Certain types of loaches and frogs will work, but it may take a while for them to get up to the size needed to control the breeding population. And breed they do… constantly. It seems that the day they become mature enough to do so they are. You can tell your kids they’re giving each other piggy-back rides because that is what it looks like if you’re not comfortable talking to them about sex just yet. Anyway, my partner picked up a loach that would work alone (we have another loaner loach of a different species) rather than in a school and a frog.

Meanwhile, the snail population continued to grow little by little, and so we would squish a few now and then too keep the population in check. It wasn’t until the other day that I saw our new loach actually take an interest in a snail, and he looked as if he was trying to suck the snail right out of its shell before the snail lowered its shell closer to the glass. A little more research later, I found that this is what these loaches do when they eat snails, so hopefully we will be able to do a little less squishing and watch a little more of nature at work. Now I just wonder if that frog will start doing his part?

So in conclusion, I’m all for a few snails in the aquarium. They certainly help keep it clean by not only eating the algae, but also decaying plants (they don’t actually eat the healthy stuff) and the inevitable dead fish every now and then. This will produce a much healthier tank that requires less chemical additives in the long run, but too many are most certainly a problem. Having a few predators will help control the population, but once in a while it might be a good idea to give a few a good squish if it looks like there are too many. Your other fish will thank you for it.