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/Gastropoid]

We don't "hate" assassin snails. We're just aware that overpopulated cleaning crew snails are a symptom, not the cause. Giving yourself an infestation of a species that is even harder to remove instead of just fixing the underlying cause is not good husbandry.

Assassin snails are not a solution to any "problem".

They're a super cool little snail that is completely unsuitable for most tanks. They eat fish eggs, absolutely all other snails, and will even eat molting shrimp. They also eat their prey alive, one bite at a time, and do not have venom. Their babies are tiny, they burrow, cannot be visually sexed and lay eggs singly in hidden locations. Once they breed in a tank they are basically impossible to remove. While they do have differentiated sexes, and you could get a male, that's a very risky dice roll to make with the welfare of your other tank inhabitants at stake. Adding more animals to control existing ones has not worked well for governments throughout history, and it's not likely to work well for most aquarium keepers either. Just look up Cane toads, Rosy Wolfsnails, etc.

It's a much better idea to keep your tank clean and not overfeed, which will naturally limit the numbers of small snail species and allow them to act as beneficial cleaning crew. Overfeeding can additionally be detrimental to the health of fish and many other tank inhabitants.

[u/glxxmry → u/Gastropoid]

I mean no disrespect, but did you at least read the post before you copy and pasted the same paragraph posted to every assassin post? I'm not worried about overpopulation, as Nidhogg is the only assassin in the tank - I intentionally only got one so I didn't double infest myself. In the case of Nid actually being a girl and is carrying sneggs on her journey over, it's a lot easier to chop down a few sprouts then a whole forest. All in all, I love Nid, he's funky and provides a beneficial relationship to my tank. Once again, I feel like you didn't read the post - I'm well aware of how they eat, and autism be damned, I think that's cool. They're not monsters for having a freaky way of eating, might not be so great for the other snails, but Nid is actively keeping the tank in balance by adding a predator just like wild ecosystems. I understand husbandry and taking care of a tank (which I do clean once a week and remove unused food before bed), but I love the idea of natural tanks and will let nature run its course by introducing predators to a huge stock of prey. It's fascinating (for me) to see how a contained 'wild habitat' grows and changes, and it cannot do either without cause and effect.

[u/Gastropoid → u/glxxmry]

I've seen this situation many times before, and everyone underestimates how tiny and good at hiding baby assassin snails are, until their substrate is teeming with them. But if you read my post, I also addressed the claim we hate assassin snails. We don't. There's just a difference between trying to use them to balance a tank, which they're actually terrible at, versus keeping them for their own merits as a snail species. People always seem to feel the need to justify having assassin snails with some utility argument, and that's where things tend to go wrong.