Petshrimp.com Discussion Forum

Newbie here!

I'm an experienced hobbyist, but several months ago I set up my first 20 gallon, fully planted shrimp tank. Over the last 6 to 8 weeks I started getting a large "bloom" of small snails. I'm thinking of adding a couple of Assasin Snails but I'm not sure how they'll do with my RCS. Any other suggestions will be appreciated. I'll try to attach a not very good photo of the tank before the snail outbreak. Thanks all

Keith

http://s1186.photobucket.com/albums/z373/kjhnstn/

Hi Keith,

Assassin snails don't harm shrimp at all. You may hear reports from people claiming that their assassin snail "ate" their still alive shrimp, but those people don't realize that their shrimp was on its way out anyway. No healthy shrimp sticks around and waits for the slow snail to wrap itself around the shrimp and start chomping on it.

I had numerous tiny snails in my shrimp tank as well and added assassin snails but they wouldn't touch these little guys. They'll eat larger snails but not these. I gave up and removed the assassins and introduced several freshwater nerite snails to try to rid my tanks of filamentous algae. After several weeks it's almost completely eliminated and so are the little snails. My guess is the nerites out-competed these little guys and they were starved out.

The assassin snails can't eat super tiny snails...that's true. But once the assassin snails reproduce the super tiny assassin babies finish off all the super tiny non-assassins. The assassins don't eat each other...not even their young.

davrx wrote:I had numerous tiny snails in my shrimp tank as well and added assassin snails but they wouldn't touch these little guys. They'll eat larger snails but not these. I gave up and removed the assassins and introduced several freshwater nerite snails to try to rid my tanks of filamentous algae. After several weeks it's almost completely eliminated and so are the little snails. My guess is the nerites out-competed these little guys and they were starved out.