Bettas eat snails?

[ParadoxOwl]

I am beginning to question my Betta's ability to live with anything. I have a few, 21, baby snails that came from plants (6 from a live bearer) and am raising them to give them to some of my friends who have ponds and aquariums.

Now, D.W. (the devil Betta) lived peacefully with a nerite and a golden apple snail... until today. If i hadn't seen him do this, I would have never guessed. My baby snails have been dis-appearing. I thought maybe they were hiding or whatever, but no. I watched him swim down and gulp up a baby in one bite!

He then proceeded to go to our golden apple snail and ram him. The snail seemed indifferent, just going along. A few minutes later the snail dropped to the bottom. Now he normally did this so i didn't think much of it. I go back an hour later and the snail is dead with a broken shell near his foot!

D.W. is in a 10g heated, filtered, planted tank. Is it possible he is just a very angry fish?

 

[hecurcia]

I am not sure if he eats them, but maybe he beats the crap out of them. I have two bettas and one is a lazy one. He doesn't care about his tank mates so he is well behaved. On the other hand, red tail beats the snails with his tail until the snail fall off the glass/plants. He does this over and over again but only with the big snails. I was surprised to find up to 10 empty shells every water change. There was nothing else in that tank than the betta. So he either beat them until they got all stressed out or he ate them. Or he ate them when they were almost dead.

 

[ParadoxOwl]

I watched him swoop? down and gobble up one of the babies, and i found no empty shells (i removed gravel to monitor the babies) among the debris i scooped out.

My other Betta, much like yours, tolerates 2 snails, 3 cory cats, and 3 oto cats. Well, he hates when the one snail Albert takes over his floating Betta log, but he's ok otherwise.

Could D.W. just be an overly aggressive fish?

 

[20GL]

My betta lives peacefully with a school of 15 neons, but he kills/eats the baby snails.

 

[vespasianus]

My betta Orion killed one amano shrimp out of 5 I had one time, then I took them out until they grew a bit, thinking they would be able to defend themselves. So I put them back in after a while. He then proceded to kill the rest one by one, and then a few ramshorn snails he had in his tank. Now he's alone, king of his home. I should have taken his warning when the shrimp thing happened that he wasn't going to share his place with any living thing, not even my hand which he attacks lol. With bettas you just have to leave it to chance. Some are just too grumpy to have tankmates. Here's my little savage, which is not so little anymore and is now an almost 4 inch killing machine:

 

[ParadoxOwl]

This is my snail eating bugger pre-gravel removal