Mystery Snail Care and Breeding: Your Friendly Neighborhood Algae Eater!

so I've done a few videos recently on how to keep snails out of your aquarium but in the comments sections I had some questions about how to keep them alive and so that's what we're gonna talk about today so stay tuned hello everyone this is Jason from primetime aquatics and yesterday we are going to talk about how to keep snails alive in this video our primary focus is going to be on mystery snails but for a lot of the snails that we would typically see in an aquarium the same general rules will apply so why keep mystery snails I think one of the reasons why a lot of people get mystery snails because they hear that they are really good at cleaning off algae and as we're going to see in this video yes that is true there are also really good scavengers and they're super peaceful they come a lot of cool colors and they can be fun and interesting to watch so let's talk about how to keep mystery snails successfully so this is a 20 gallon long that is housing some Japan blue Guppies that was the original intent but it is also now housing some mystery snails and this has become a rather productive breeding tank for us when it comes to mystery snails so we are going to be talking about how to care for them how to breed them where they come from South America Bolivia Brazil Peru Paraguay now these are really cool little animals to have in a fish tank science they don't get super huge so you're maybe looking at an inch and a half is maybe two inches max so they're not gonna get super big the coloration is really cool because you get all different types of colors here we see this is actually a gold mystery snail with a little bit of algae so it's got kind of a green tint to it but they come in all kinds of different colors gold and black and blue and there's also some with some patterns on them so really cool I think what people really enjoy about them like I said before is they clean algae and they go through the detritus they eat dead plant we use which is really nice they are super super super peaceful so this is not a type of organism you're gonna want in a tank where you've got some semi aggressive fish we'll talk about that in a moment but these are very peaceful animals so it kind of provides a benefit and that way and because they are so peaceful we do have to consider our tank mates but they go really well with freshwater shrimp you know something like motorcyclist would be really cool I've kept them with bristlenose before I would exercise a little bit of caution especially if you want to breed them small tetras and here we see Guppies Raz Boras you know something like a hatchet fish which is just gonna stay at the top of the tank all those might be good options but we really want to stay with small non aggressive fish that generally feed mid water top water that's gonna reduce the likelihood that they make a snack out of your mystery snails now something else to consider I did a video again on how to get rid of snails I would watch that video because it also goes over a lot of how you're going to wind up killing your snails and I think that is also instructive so when it comes to tank mates stay away from cichlids almost all type of cichlids are either going to eat the snails or they're gonna pick at them potentially so we really really want to be careful with semi-aggressive fish any type of a loach like I said cichlids would be a really probably not a good choice when it comes to temperature the standard aquarium temperatures are going to be pretty good so somewhere in the 70s usually for us we keep them in the upper 70s even close to 80 now there's a couple water parameters are really important one make sure you are controlling ammonia and nitrites and nitrates when you're keeping snails they are very sensitive to all three pH is also important I think one of the reasons why some people may have bad luck with snails in general is the pH is too low and if the pH goes too low their shells will start to break down so for us we're in a good situation because our pH is right around 1/8 so if you can get above neutral ideally in those upper sevens it's probably going to be better for the snails than a lower pH because that lower pH is gonna have an impact on the calcium carbonate that they need in order to keep their shells healthy now again along with pH we also have to talk a little bit about water hardness once again for people who have bad luck with snails generally speaking water hardness may be an issue for us it's not our water hardness is right around somewhere between 150 to 180 parts per million on both the general hardness and the carbonate hardness which goes a long way in keeping snail shells healthy we actually recently did a video on water hardness I will put that card in the upper right hand corner I think it's an important video it will help you better understand how to keep snails successfully when you know about water hardness I will also put a card in the upper right hand corner when it comes to pH I think that will be helpful as well food snails are really really easy to feed a lot of times when people buy snails it's because they want to have algae control and they do eat algae they will keep a tank looking pretty good this tank here we make a zero effort to scrape algae off of any surface and so anything that you see that is free of algae is because of the snails and I think they're doing a pretty good job of keeping the tanks looking good now one thing to keep in mind if you're going to be buying snails to control algae and they get that algae in check make sure you have food for them to eat because one of the things that can kill snails is really starvation there are constantly much munching on stuff like detritus the algae that we have in the tank but once that stuff has gotten under control we want to feed them in so one of the things that I do if I've you know on a tank like this is I will drop some food in after the lights go off really good foods our repast you the gel based food so I'll throw some community plus in there maybe some algae wafers some sinking pellets and I put enough food in there so that when I wake up in the morning everything is gone if I wake up and there's still food in the tank I know that I've probably fed them a little too much let's talk a little bit about tank size most internet sources will tell you somewhere between a 5 and a 10 gallon tank is a good minimum I would tend to agree with that we don't have mystery snails and anything less than a 10 gallon just because of their size they do get decently sized you know if you're looking at an inch and a half or 2 inch round thing and a five and a half gallon if that's one of the only things you have in that tank that might look pretty oak pretty decent but I would prefer a 10 gallon or larger to house a mystery snail or two now when it comes to how you decorate that tank surface area is a nice thing because surface area will allow for biofilms to form it'll allow for algae to grow so you see in our twenty gallon we have driftwood we have rocks we have live plants and all of those things work out wonderfully the cool thing about snails in a planted tank is they will eat the dying leaves now I will say that a lot of people think that snails will destroy at least mystery snails and ram's horns and you know pest snails will destroy plants I personally haven't found that to be true what I find is that they eat the leaves that are either getting ready to die or are dying in a planted tank but for the most part you can see here we've got crypts in our tank in other tanks we have planted tanks with mystery snails in them and we haven't had any issues with them just eating healthy live plants be careful about how you cover your tank mystery snails need a tight cover on their tank or they sometimes will leave and that's not a good thing so we wanted to have a nice tight fitting lid also watch your filter intake so if you've got a canister filter or a hang on the back one of the problems I had a long time ago is I had an aqua aqua clear filter on a tank and some of the aqua clears they have relatively large slats on the intake well what happens is the mystery snails inevitably they go over there and they wind up getting their heads stuck in the intake it happens and so it's it's kind of a pain when it happens you got to shut the filter down and take the intake off and hopefully they can kind of figure it out on their own in my experience that's what they did but if they don't then you have to deal with getting them out of that filter intake and that could be a pain so I would highly recommend if you are going to have a an intake for a hang on the back make sure if those those little areas where the water is going through the intake make sure there is a sponge filter an intake sponge filter on there or that the the intake slants are very very narrow now when it comes to filtration I as I mentioned I do use I have have use hang on the backs before I think sponge filters are a very safe way to go as well certainly a canister filter but just keep the intake sponges on them so let's say you really love the mystery snails and you want to breed them how are you going to do that well you need to you need a male and a female actually the male's tend to stay a little bit smaller than the females do so it may be what you might do is go out and get yourself five or six of them throw them in a tank again I like 20 gallons or above especially for breeding because you could potentially have a lot of mystery snails that can produce a fair amount of waste and so we don't want to have water quality issues water quality issues will be easier to deal with if a tank is a little bit larger so for breeding what I would do again you want a nice tight fitting lid I would also lower the water level it probably at least an inch inch or two from the surface of the top of the tank what our mystery snails have been doing is they are actually laying eggs on the lid itself it's really important that one that lid is tight-fitting because the eggs are always laid out of the water above the water line however the eggs also need to stay moist that works best we have a nice tight-fitting lid and you've got water in the tank and the tank is very humid in that in the area where there is no water and so we've been having really good luck with that they've been laying those eggs on the top of the lid and there can be a lot of effect here's a picture of the basically a spent group of eggs where you can see the little holes that the fry of already all hatched but that was at one point attached to the top of the tank and then kind of fell in after it dried out and after that these snails will release that that bundle is gonna stay there for a few weeks you know you're somewhere between two to four weeks we've found right around three weeks or so and then all of a sudden that thing has fallen in water and we've got baby snails everywhere because they have all hatched out now the baby snails there's really nothing in particular you have to do it like nothing special they're just gonna start doing what the adults do and that is he algae detritus dead leaves uneaten fish food if you're getting a lot of them and you can have a cocoon that's gonna give you a hundred maybe more at one time it's actually quite surprising how many eggs can come out of us now you wouldn't think it's possible but they can produce a lot of eggs at a time so once you have those mystery snails you're probably gonna have to up your feeding the other thing that you may have to do is keep an eye on calcium levels in the tank and possibly provide some calcium supplements in the form of some type of snail food just so that they're getting enough calcium because when you have a hundred mystery snails and they're all growing can really put some some pressures on your on your eco system other than that there really aren't any issues with raising up the juveniles and two full-grown mystery snails the one thing I will mention is if you have a mystery snail that looks like it might be dead one of the things that I do is if a mystery snail is in the tank for longer than a day in the same position I may take it out and just make sure that it's not rotting a dead mystery snail is usually gonna smell pretty bad so if you remove it from the tank real quick and it's not smelling put it back but it could be in bad shape so you're gonna want to keep an eye on that if your snail really isn't moving around something may be wrong maybe it's not getting the food that it needs they generally will live around a year so if it's at the point where it's about a year old it may be reaching just the end of its life so if there are any challenges to keeping snails it really is centered around water parameters making sure you all your nitrogen parameters are in check your pH is high enough to keep them your water hardness is correct if they start to have any flaking to their their shells where you get have like white patches or their shells look thin or may be pitted that's probably due to not enough calcium maybe the pH has gone too low or you don't have enough calcium your water so you might want to deal with that via your dietary needs but they're really cool little organisms a lot of great colors super super peaceful and they look pretty nice in a planted tank

Channel: Prime Time Aquatics

Views: 184,629

Rating: 4.9283695 out of 5

Keywords: mystery snail care, how to breed mystery snails, mystery snail tank mates, mystery snail tank size, mystery snail tank setup, mystery snail breeding, mystery snail water parameters, is my mystery snail dead, how to tell if your mystery snail is dead, mystery snail feeding, what do mystery snail eggs look like, mystery snail prime time aquatics, golden mystery snail, mystery snails and shrimp, mystery snails and guppy, apple snail care, apple snail breeding, apple snail tank

Id: gWWx2JU_JEo

Length: 12min 13sec (733 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 09 2019