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Re: snails (MTS and "other")...
on 01:48 AM 6/10/00 , heinesen wrote:
>The MTS's are invited residents, but somehow I ended up with other snails
>that I don't want. They have round, dark shells, and I have been picking
>them out by hand, usually when they're still small (alive). I even found
>one living in the bottom of my filter when I cleaned it out yesterday. Two
>were also stuck in the Eheim surface skimmer intake.
Sounds like garden-variety pond snails. In my experience you're wasting
your time by picking them out; once you've seen a few it's too late to
eliminate them that way.
> They seem very
>fragile; as soon as I touch them, the outer parts of their shells seem to
>crush.
This makes me think your water is soft. That's one way to cut down on the
snail population.
> I read in Baensch that the flesh of dead snails will poison a tank,
>so I don't want to use any chemicals to kill them.
I think it's talking about a larger biomass of snails - say, a few dead
apple snails. But chemicals would kill your MTS too, and quite possibly
your plants.
I've found three things to be true in my experience with snails:
1. If you get the MTS population to increase, they seem to out-compete the
pond snails and drive their population down to a low level.
2. If any type of snail breeds like crazy in your tank, you're probably
overfeeding the fish.
3. Neither MTS, pond snails, or red ramshorns have ever had any detectable
effect on my plants. All three eat algae, but none is terribly effective at
eliminating algae.
I have all three types and rather like them all. BTW, if you want to
encourage the MTS to reproduce without encouraging other types, bury a few
shrimp pellets under the gravel once a week.
--
michael moncur mgm at starlingtech_com http://www.starlingtech.com/
"If we don't change direction soon, we'll end up where we're going."
-- Professor Irwin Corey