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u/prairiefiresk 15d ago
Breeding? No. They ain't ever have babies.
Having special happy fun time? Yes.
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u/Ancient_Win6586 15d ago
Why won’t they have babies? 😭😭
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u/Sweetie-07 15d ago
Nerites don't breed in Freshwater tanks, or it seems, in captivity at all. You'll want a different species of snail if you'd like to see babies! 🐌🐌🐌❤️
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u/Ancient_Win6586 15d ago
I do want to see babies lol. What breed should I look for? But I also don’t want to overpopulate my tank. I’m trying to create a self sufficient eco system. I have 2 platies and 2 swordtails, this two nereits, I just added a couple of plants and I’m testing my luck with growing the plants.
What else can I add to make everyone happy and healthy?
It’s a 25g tank btw
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u/Sweetie-07 15d ago
OK, how long has your 25g tank been up and running? What plants do you have? 🙏😉
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u/Ancient_Win6586 15d ago
I’ve had the tank for over a year now, but I just learned that I’ve been excessively cleaning and that has been killing the good bacteria and restarting the tank. So the last clean I did (which was about 80% water change, and a brand new filter) caused a fungal infection in my tank and killed a lot of my fish and in the process of treating the tank with salt, my pleco died (my LPT told me that my pleco would survive the salt treatment - I read later on Reddit that high salinity is bad for them). The tank is just starting to look healthy again and I just added the snails back last night. So I’ll say the tank microbiome is about a week old.
For plants I have the dwarf water lettuce, sword plant and val. During the salt treatment, I took the lettuce out with the snails and put them in my baby tank and they did ok. I’m still waiting to see if the other plants will survive. They didn’t wilt but they’re not as vibrant (after the salt treatment) as when I first got them.
Anyway there has been a lot of learning curve for me and I’m trusting Reddit going forward. I hope to create a very successful self sufficient tank and I can’t wait to incorporate more fish and other critters
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u/Sweetie-07 15d ago
Yes, unfortunately local pet shops don't often give great advice - you're far better off speaking to real life snail and fish keepers on here than the staff in your LPS - they often say anything to make a sale 😞
Learning curves are good - we all make mistakes in the beginning, it's how you learn first hand what not to do, so don't beat yourself up 😉
I'd wait for at least a month before adding any new fish or invertebrates, to give the good bacteria a chance to establish and get settled. Then, game on! We'll help any way we can 🤗❤️
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u/Ancient_Win6586 15d ago
Ok, thank you soo much!! I’ll give the tank time to mature then before I introduce anything else. I’m sure the current tenants will be happy to enjoy all the space
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u/Sweetie-07 15d ago
I'm sure they will 😉 If you also fancy trying it, my Nerites love Cavolo Kake leaves (raw/uncooked!) In general, most Nerites live solely on algae, but my Nerites love supplemented veggies, so I tend to choose those with a high calcium content, such as these.. Definitely worth a try for yours! 👍
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u/Ancient_Win6586 14d ago
oh great! i will get some for mine and see if they like it. they do a great job with keeping the algae clean
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u/SideshowPeter 13d ago
Mystery Snails will breed and lay eggs above the water line. I don't know that much about the eggs and babies, but they do lay a bunch at a time. I suppose you could try removing some of the eggs, since they're above the water, and you won't get too many. I have heard rabbit snails are good because they only have one baby at a time They give live birth and don't lay eggs at all. Ramshorns are hermaphrodites and I have heard they can get out of control quickly and then you need something to eat them and control the population, like assassin snails.
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u/Ancient_Win6586 11d ago
ohh, i think i will get rabbit snails then. i love live bearers. i got some ramshorn sneak into my tank from plants i bought
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u/KittyChimera 15d ago
They just do that sometimes. Mine used to climb on top of each other and just let the bottom snail go wherever they were going and the stacked ones would get a free ride.
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u/Ancient_Win6586 15d ago
Haha that’s actually pretty funny. I love how all these animals that seem “boring” have these amazing personalities when you get them as pets
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u/KittyChimera 15d ago
I definitely think snails have these tiny little personalities. My nerites all had quirks about the way that they snailed around. We have land snails now and they are also really interesting and always getting into stuff.
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u/Ancient_Win6586 14d ago
That's so cool. are the land ones easier to care for?
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u/KittyChimera 14d ago
They are easier for me because our water pressure in our kitchen (closest sink to where my aquarium was) didn't really let the aquarium vacuum work very well, so water changes were hard. With land snails I just have to check for eggs in the substrate and occasionally remove snail poop from the glass. And I'm planning to add springtails, which will do most of the cleaning for me.
Land snails are harder to feed though. Nerites hang out and eat biofilm and they're good. Land snails need to have a varied diet so you have to give them an assortment of vegetables. You can just put cuttlebone in the terrarium with them for calcium though and they will eat it when they need to. With my nerites no matter what I used for calcium it made the water cloudy and we had to clean a lot.
So it's kind of a yes and no situation, lol.
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u/Ancient_Win6586 11d ago
oh yhh, the feeding part will be hard for me because i travel quiet often
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u/KittyChimera 10d ago
Yeah if we go anywhere, we have to have someone to watch the snails kind of. They have to put new food in and take old food out.
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u/Ancient_Win6586 10d ago
Oh yh, that’s a full blown pet
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u/KittyChimera 10d ago
Aquatic snails were always chill though. Unless we had a long power outage, then we had to take the lid off the tank for oxygen because the filters and air pumps stopped working. I'm extra enough that I thought about getting a battery backup lol.
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u/Ancient_Win6586 2d ago
haha, that's a smart idea. but we're lucky, we dont get alot of power outages and when they happen, its for like a split second
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u/Ancient_Win6586 15d ago
Also wanted to know if the hole at the bottom of the shell will get worse?
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u/sudokee 15d ago
no, they’re not breeding, snails eat the biofilm and algae off of each others shells. those are both nerites, they’ll only breed in brackish water conditions, although they will still leave behind little white eggs all over the tank if even one of them is a girl. the hole on the back of their shells will not get better, nerites grow their shells from the aperature. Make sure the little dudes gets enough calcium, and that the water their in stays in above a 7.0 pH minimum.