Disappeared Snails? Floating moss ball?

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Hello all, first time posting here.

I started my SuperShrimp tank back in May; it's about 8-10 gallon, with a white "sand" substrate. The 10 snails and 16 shrimp I populated the tank with seemed to be doing well, but lately I haven't been seeing many of the snails. The tank also has both algae sold on the petshrimp website.

For a good month or two I could reliably count most of the tank's inhabitants. After adding some things to the tank, however (some java fern that I think is dying, but I'm going to give it a moment to think about that, and a magnetic brush to clean the algae from the inside of the glass), now I only typically see one of the ten snails at a time. Last week I saw four at once, which was unusual.

When I used the magnetic brush, I only cleaned three of the four tank walls, leaving the back wall untouched. Since then I have only continued to clean the front wall of the tank, so I can see in.

Another weird detail: my round moss ball has taken to floating. I can squeeze a bit of air out from it and it'll drift back down to the bottom, but reliably it makes its way back up to the surface eventually. I think it started doing this before the addition of the java fern, etc.

I have questions about the shrimps, too, but I'll take those to the other forum.

Any thoughts? I'm worried that maybe the chemistry of my tank has gotten thrown off and the critters are all in hiding or something.

Thanks!
A

[Keystone]

That's pretty common for moss balls.

If you got you snails from Mustafa they like to burrow in the sand and may not be visible for days at a time

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Another update: I had forgotten to mention before that my tank has an infestation of some very tiny squiggly organisms, which I didn't mention before because they seemed to be not causing much trouble. However, I just took a very close look, and I can see that there is a cluster clinging to one of the snail's shells, and that maybe the mystery squiggles are more prolific than I'd previously thought. Help! Are the squiggles taking over, and what can I do??

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