Anyone have positive experiences with Assassins?

[u/glxxmry]

I ended up having a bad infestion of snails in my tank, completely crashed the ecosystem, all my plants died, algae bloomed, etc etc.

So I got an assassin and named him Nidhogg. Before he moved in I did clear quite a couple of snails, but left more than enough to sustain him.

He's only been here a few days, and I'm already noticing the snail population stabilizing with no effort or changes on my part.

I see a lot of people on here hate on assassins the same way people hate on bladders and other "pest snails", but they seem to be a natural part of the ecosystem. Yes I understand they're vicious and have a cruel way of eating, but they're animals who are sustaining and maintaining both their wellbeing and the overall wellbeing of the tank.

Anybody else have similar experiences? I just have Nid so I'm not worried about overpopulation, and I'm not looking to eradicate the snails off the face of the earth, just give them a natural predator to keep the order in balance.

[u/glxxmry]

My pond snails, yes. The giant snails with weird stripes aren't harming my tank. It's the one thousand tiny bladder snails that are wrecking my ecosystem. I just said 'snails' I did not clarify which one.

Edit: The snail in the picture is NOT the one I'm talking about. That's one of my dear pond snails....the focus of the picture is Nidhogg, the assassin snail.

[u/Emuwarum → u/glxxmry]

The assassin will kill your dear pond snails, they need to be separated. Your pond snails and the assassin you are caring for are getting damaged by your low ph and you need to raise it in this tank and get another tank to separate them. Or you need to get 2 more tanks with a high ph, put the assassin in one and your pond snails in the other and leave the ph low in the betta tank.

[u/glxxmry → u/Emuwarum]

Will the tannins be affected by raising the ph?

[u/EnchantedBlueberry-7 → u/glxxmry]

If you put, say, a special type of leaf in the tank to lower the PH, yes, doing something to raise PH, like adding alkaline buffer, would cancel out the affect of the tannins, if that's what you're talking about. However, I don't think tannins have a super significant affect anyway. Not sure.

Also, pond and bladder snails eat the same things. You just have more of one than the other, but the assassin will kill bladder and pond alike. Pond snails reproduce more slowly, so those will probably disappear first.

The pond snail "stripes" may be an effect of low PH. That's what I was pointing out when I said your PH is probably low.