Snail abandoned shell.

**43a57** · 5th Jan 2010, 20:29

anyone has experience with snails abandoning shells?
I got a snail with a cracked shell and the snail crawled away from it's own shell. leaving only a small section of the shell still attached only.
will the snail survive? it's more like a slug now. it's away from the fishes now otherwise i'm sure it would be easy fish food.

**schizome** · 5th Jan 2010, 20:46

Haven't seen anything like that before man. Won't the snail die itself without getting eaten by fishes?

**stormhawk** · 7th Jan 2010, 12:35

It won't survive if there are fish in there. The inner part of the snail's body is soft and has no armor to prevent it from being eaten. If you want it to survive, catch it and place it in a breeding trap and feed it with good food so that the shell can regrow.

May I ask, what snail is this? Because some can survive without their shell and eventually regrow a new one provided they don't get eaten before that.

**43a57** · 9th Jan 2010, 20:24

it was a common pond snail. it only had a small part of the shell attached, but now it's dead. decided to crawl out of the water and out of the container and dropped outside and dried up. think it was pestered too much by the seed shrimps in the fishless container since it was shell-less. it was fine when i placed it in the container.

i kept the snails that came with plants given to me by a friend. some how over time, the snails slowly kept dying one by one. think there wasn't enough food to sustain them, they were great at removing algae on the sides of tank/containers. I ever experimented with a container filled with a little fertiliser and allowed it to become all green, the snails cleared it in a few days.

I think i'm left with only one or 2 snails.

**stormhawk** · 10th Jan 2010, 01:47

It's not lack of food that kills snails. Usually if the water has some issues, they will die off no matter how well you feed them. I started with a single Ramshorn and they multiplied into the hundreds. Finally destroyed all of them with the use of Assassin Snails.

In your case, I think you should do some water tests. I remember I had a tank once, where the snails would die within days upon introduction into that tank. There was something wrong with the water that I could not pinpoint, since I never tested for parameters back then. I do believe now, that high nitrate levels would kill them.

**edwardchuajh** · 10th Jan 2010, 17:23

Hi,

I too have a ramshorn that just suddenly turned over, shrivelled and died eventually, and my nerite also started to look sluggish at the same time. Right after I overfed some algae wafers.. suspected a nitrite/nitrate spike.

I always thought snails to be more hardy, could moderate nitrite and nitrate levels kill them? Cuz I have 11 yamato shrimps and they are as happy as ever =P

**Fuzzy** · 11th Jan 2010, 12:02

Snails should be less sensitive to nitrite / nitrate / copper than shrimp are. Yamatos are really hardy though.

And I've caught my Yamatos killing and eating my snails in the past...beware they are evil evil shrimp!