sweetnitanitro, are you around? a fish tank query!

[thisisyesterday]

Hiya
We have a slight snail problem!!!

didn't buy any, but one day we noticed one in there. must have come in on a plant. then we saw another, so we thought well hey, great 2 snails. lovely.

I then spotted a couple more, and 2 lots of eggs on leaves (which i removed)

we now have at least 24 baby snails in the tank! it's only a 24 litre tank too.
I can see 2 more batches of eggs which i will try and remove tomorrow.. but is there anything I can do??
will a fish shop take the ones we don't want? I can't kill the ones that have already hatched

is there any way, aside from taking out any more eggs i spot, to stop any more hatching???

Is this a tropical tank? If so there are a couple of types of fish that will eat snails. Other than removing the eggs there not much else that I know of.

I am currently in the middle of a major guppy explosion, gone from 4 to 49 in 4 months.....

Morning!

First of all don't use any of those chemical snail killers you get in pet shops because if all the snails die at once then that's a lot of corpses and you'll get a massive ammonia spike which'll be bad news for your fish.

Snails aren't usually a problem unless the population grows to epic proportions. I'm guessing the snails are either ramshorn (flat spiral shell) or some kind of physidae (round conical shell). These are both considered pests and they breed pretty readily so the shop won't take them back. If they are apple snails or malaysian trumpet snails then the shop may take them back or you could sell them on ebay. This site will help you ID them- www.applesnail.net/content/snails_various.php

Another thing that people sometimes recommend is to get a loach to eat the snails. This is usually a bad idea so don't do it! Your tank is on the small side and a lot of shops recommend clown loaches which grow massive. Also loaches are shoaling fish so you can't get just one.

So the only way to get rid of pest snails I'm afraid is to kill them If you stick a bit of cucumber in the tank in the evening it will soon get covered in snails, then you can chuck it out. To keep the population down you must make sure not to overfeed your fish so that the snails won't have any food. Just give the fish what they can eat in 2 mintues and then scoop out whatever they haven't finished. This is probably pretty tricky in a 23 litre tank so there's another reason to upgrade

There we go, aquatic snails in a nutshell Hope that helps!

there are 2 kinds i think

one I am almost definite are these

the others look like the ones pictured beneath it, though they';re still tiny so not 100% sure

will try the cucumber thing, but it makes me feel really sad!!!