[Earth Eater]

Hi all, my tank is infested with trumpet snails. I am taking all of my fish out of it today and bringing them to a nice large planted tank at rogers. Whatever fish you guys/galls pick would be the only fish in the tank until the snails are gone.

Do any of you know of any snail eating cichlids?

Thanks

 

[icy.bing]

puffers? =)

 

[~Lynae]

I dont know about cichlids, but Clown Loaches are apparently notorious for eating snails, however, malaysian trumpets are one of the only snails with a very pointy, prickly shell. I dont know if any fish is guaranteed to eat them, you could get Assassin Snails, which eat other snails. But what I do, is just keep clearing out the largest ones by hand, that way, they cant breed when they're too small, so the small ones can stay... until they get a bit bigger, then they're outta there. I'm slowly getting my numbers of trumpets down by hand...!

 

[kelly528]

I would invest in some assassim snails. MTS have very hard, sharp shells which is why you never hear of people using them as feeders... they are too afraid that a fish will break a tooth on a MTS or get one lodged in its throat.

 

[Earth Eater]

Thank-you all very much

 

[someguy]

i just finished dealing with the same problem.....


it took a mulit stage process!

i would cut water bottles in half(long), out a bunch of algae wafers in, and wait a couple hours, the snails load in, i took the bottle out and dumped it into the pea puffer tank. he'd suck them right out. I filled, no kidding, atleast six bottles worth to get it to a reasonable state.

I the got a couple zebra loachs, and they finsihed the rest of them off nicely.


i did a bunch of research try'n to solve this. other known snail eaters.

Loaches generally, theres a couple that don't, but most of them eat snails to some degree. shell doesn't matter, they more suck them out

Pea puffers are great too, depending who else is in the tank, they also suck 'em out.

sparkling gourami's, known snail eaters, although fairly un agreesive, they work well in a matinence programs

thers some more i can't think of right now too....

 

[SophieThomas]

If you do not want snails in the tank, not even assassins (which are pretty cool by the way), then Yoyo Loaches are the best loach to eat snails. If you can't get your hands on those then Clown loaches are your second best. Clown loaches do get quite big though and require being in a group.

The Yoyo loach is pretty cool because they actual have marking of the word "YoYo" down their sides

 

[gimlid]

ditto on the clowns and yoyos, mine used to slurp them out of the shells as fast as i could supply them. I am still cleaning old shells out of my substrate a year after I found the loaches a new home.

 

[Earth Eater]

thanks

 

[plantedinvertz]

YoYo loaches. They were in my swordtail tank and they did a grreat job on the snails

 

[Reva]

Any of the botia loaches. What size is your tank? If small, botia striata stay small. Angelicus botia only get to 3'' and are pretty black with yellow polka dots. Clown loaches will do it, but they grow pretty big. Beware of skunk loaches. They are the best at it, but will turn to eating fish eyeballs when they run out of snails. the other three I mentioned wont do that. Yoyo loaches turn aggressive and get big too. hope this helps