Introducing malaysian trumpet snails

[Mikejr20]

I'm getting in 10 Malaysian trumpet snails tomorrow and 10 ramhorn snails. How do I introduce them into my tank? Do I use the drip method? Thanks in advance for the help.

 

[siva]

They are super hardy, especially the MTS, so it isn't necessary to drip, but it certainly couldn't hurt.

 

[Smcoyle87]

I just had a Malaysian Trumpet Snail EXPLOSION! Just added an assassin snail to keep the numbers down. Watch out, that's a lot of snail to add to your tank, prepare for an "infestation." Lol

 

[Mikejr20]

Should I put some in my breeder tank too? I seen that over feeding creates the infestation. How do I know if I'm over feeding cause I usually throw some in and it's usually gone within a few seconds. I'm actually kinda scared I'm under feeding my fish.

 

[Zevyn]

You shouldn't have to drip acclimate, but it won't hurt. I just floated my bag for 15 and added some tank water thereafter every 5 minutes, and didn't bother dumping half of it and repeating the process. I just netted them out of the bag when it was almost full and then dropped them in.

 

[siva]

You could put some in your breeder now, or wait until you have a larger population. If you're not overfeeding, which it definitely sounds like you aren't, I wouldn't worry about a population explosion.

 

[Zevyn]

I just had a Malaysian Trumpet Snail EXPLOSION! Just added an assassin snail to keep the numbers down. Watch out, that's a lot of snail to add to your tank, prepare for an "infestation." Lol

Ditto. I dropped 25 in about a month ago, and now there's hundreds of babies all over the place. They don't exactly hide during daylight hours like the adults either.

There's no way it can be from overfeeding, because up until a week ago, I was doing daily water changes for 3 weeks straight after a mini-cycle (which started about a week before the MTS went in). I was vacuuming detritus off the sand and changing out about 40% of the water every day, and fasting the fish to some extent.

I threw 4 Assassins in there last week (was 5, but one of them had a cracked shell during shipping somehow and wasn't moving). Two are half an inch and two are a quarter inch, so they're considerably smaller than the adult MTS at 1". I've read that Assassins can take down larger snails in groups, but mine don't do that. I see the half inch ones strut right past a half-buried adult MTS and not bat an eye.

Last night I had a power outage and was swapping out my UPS units when the battery from the first drained to 5% and it was the first time I'd seen my tank at night. Wall to wall MTS, haha. The largest Assassin was chilling out on the glass in between a mass of them. Who knows if he managed to eat one, considering they eat about 1 per day... Time will tell I guess.

It doesn't bother me that much, since they tend to stay under the sand for the most part, and the Cory's do a good job of keeping the babies off the surfaces of everything when they go around sifting.

 

[siva]

I've had a different experience. I have them in atleast 30 tanks and, except for the tank that I purposely feed a lot so the various snail populations will in fact explode, I've never had to remove a single one.

 

[Mikejr20]

Put 5 ramhorns in my breeder tank and the rest in my 29gal. They came out immediately and moved quickly to their hideouts.