Need help with Black Mystery Snails

[redmollie]

Hello everyone,

I was hoping to get some advice on my tank that I purchased recently. It is 5 gallons with a filter, heater, and live plants. I change a little bit of the water every week & condition it & check the ph. For a few weeks I've had a single betta fish in there. Three days ago, I purchased ONE Black Mystery Snail from the pet store. The fish never bothered snail and seems to being doing fine - there is food in the gravel & and algae for it to eat. I specifically bought one snail because I didn't want to get two and one day find 50 snails in the tank. Imagine my surprise when I looked in the tank a few minutes ago and surprise, there is a baby snail! About half the size of a dime. At first I was really excited because it's pretty cute - but how in the world did one snail have a baby? Can Black Mystery Snails reproduce without a mate? My next thought was.. where there one baby snail there is more. There is only one "big" baby snail, but upon closer inspection I can see on the sides of the tank these translucent wriggling things the size of a pencil point. Looks like more babies. What can I do about this? I hate the thought of killing the babies. I hope the betta fish eats them when they get big enough. Any advice is appreciated!

I also checked near the water line for any egg sacs but I can't see anything.
Sorry for the wall of text!


Best wishes,
Mollie

 

[cfosgate]

Mystery snails lay rather large egg clutches above the water line which you definitely would have seen. I suspect you have baby ramshorn, pond or bladder snails that hitchiked in with the mystery snail and reproduced.

 

[Luananeko]

Snails can store sperm from previous matings, which is why you're never guaranteed to avoid a population boom even when buying only one. The only snails that are guaranteed not to breed like crazy on you are Nerite snails. They tend to eat more algae too compared to the Mystery snails, who tend to be more of scavengers.

As to what to do with the current baby boom... You can either manually remove every baby you find (of course at that size they're too little to rehome, so killing them is kinda your only option beyond moving them to a breeding tank and making an army of inbred snails), or you can get an assassin snail to try and keep the population in check. They'll eat the eggs as well as the babies, but usually won't go after a full grown Mystery snail. Again, the babies will be dying, but at least not by your hand...

 

[Khuligirl93]

Mystery snails lay rather large egg clutches above the water line which you definitely would have seen. I suspect you have baby ramshorn, pond or bladder snails that hitchiked in with the mystery snail and reproduced.

+1
If they were baby mystery snails, you would have seen a very large and obvious egg sac at the top of the water sitting there for days and days before they hatched. I agree that they're probably pond/bladder or ramshorn snails, and it'd be best to remove all that you can manually.


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