Water conditions for snails

[blainep]

So, the question is, what is the easiest or most effective way to maintain water chemistry to ensure your snails have an attractive, strong shell ?

:icon_snail: :icon_snail: :icon_snail:

[Melody]

For you in Alberta, you do nothing....lol. I believe that all water supplies there are naturally hard so you're laughing. Calcium is most important, and acidity. Ph below 7 will erode shells. If you have a healthy kH, you're laughing. Preferrably 5+ dkH. Tufa Rock and Coral with aragonite are great. You can also use oyster shell or dolomite. You can add a drop or two of Kent's Calcium periodically as well.

Other than that, keep the tank clean and they'll be beautiful.:)

[blainep]

Yes, the water here in Calgary is almost hard enough to cut with a knife. I've noticed though, in some of my tanks where I have allowed the common snail populations to grow relatively uncontrolled, the snails will get alot of shell erosion. I wonder just how much shell material they pull out of the water column and how it would affect the PH of the water.

In my tanks with fancy snails I keep a little tufa rock and keep a fairly tight control on the common snail population and haven't seen any shell issues as yet.

[Melody]

Are they Ramshorn pests? I find that Rams will feed off shells, causing damage, but I rarely see pest snails so I'm not sure if they do it or not.

As for the water column, that was debated to some degree in the snail forum. I was researching something else one day and came across some interesting information stating that freshwater snails, in 95% of the cases, are restricted to waters containing more than 3mg of Calcium per litre. That answers the question for me as to if they need it in the water column or not. If they didn't, they probably wouldn't hang out there. ;)

The interesting part was that the snail actually has to expend energy in the uptake of calcium (through food) for the shell if there isn't enough in the water column. If there is enough, the uptake is passive, requiring no energy. So we can conclude that they find ways to compensate, but it does cost them energy to do so.

If they are expending energy to compensate, then we can take it further, 'assuming' that it would interfere with the energy required for egg production, and consequently breeding. That's pure guesswork on my part though. However, when I struggle with my water parameters, which I did for years here, breeding was nil, so its sounds like a good guess to me.

To cover all bases, get a Ca reading for snail tanks and keep the kH up there as well. A high calcium diet rounds out the plan for healthy shells.

[blainep]

Sounds like I've got the answers I should need.

Interesting that alternate sources of calcium takes extra effort for the snails to make use of it.