Snail question.

The friendliest place on the web for anyone with an interest in aquariums or fish keeping!
If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.
See posts with no answers
Yes, please. Please post photos of the eggs, the babies, and the big Mystery snail. that would help a lot.

Whatever happens, even if you don't re-post here, please send me a private message of whatever you find out, because I'm very curious now.

I'm going to try to put up some links to photos and info, including applesnail.net, a good and well respected site. However any links to external sites have to wait to be approved by a moderator, so it may take a while before they post.
 
Some things I'm thinking is that your Mystery snail is not a Pomacea difusa, but rather a Spixi (Asolene spixi) which would account for the big snail's colors and eggs being underwater, but doesn't account for your babies being cream, blue and black, because as far as I know Spixis are only black and golden striped, well, and I've seen one light green one. Spixis are in the apple snail family. You can Google Images to see what they look like. I think their maximum size is about 1.25 - 1.5 inches, so smaller than a full grown Pomacea difusa.

Another possibility is that you have a female typical Mystery snail (pomacea difusa) who mated with several different colored males before you got her, laid a clump of eggs on the underside of the tank hood that you never noticed, the eggs hatched and the baby snails hatched and dropped into the water and started growing, and the eggs you see in your tank are fallen hatched and unhatched and unfertilized eggs from the clump/clutch that was on the underside of the tank hood. This scenario seems more likely.
 
The mystery snail is about the size of a ping pong ball..maybe a little bigger.
 
CatmanDru said:
Here is the page at applesnail.net about Spixi (Asolene spixi) snails with about 10 photos including a photo of an egg cluster. Be sure to scoll all the way down the page to see all the information.

Asolene spixi
Click to expand...

It's the same colors except ours is more black with little golden stripes.
 
It's the same colors except it's more black with little golden stripes...so it could be possible.
 
If it was a spixi would that explain the eggs colors and being laid underwater?
and the fact that there are so many?
 
I could be wrong about the size..I would have to look when I got home.
 
Hopey22 said:
If it was a spixi would that explain the eggs colors and being laid underwater?
and the fact that there are so many?
Click to expand...

Yes, if your big snail were a Spixi that would explain the color of the eggs and the fact that they are underwater.

But I don't think it wouldn't explain all the colors of the babies. As far as I know, Spixis don't have all those color variations -- Pomacea difusa do. And I don't think Spixis interbreed with Pomacea difusas, but they might.

look at the page I linked about Spixi: toward the bottom of the page it shows an egg clutch. It's light cream colored like you said yours is.

Do the stripes on your snail run the same direction as the stripes on the fotos of Spixis, that is, perpendicular/at right angles to the shell opening?
 
Also, when you get home, you might want to lift the tank hood up and look in all the nooks and crannies for signs that there might have been a Mystery (pomacea difusa) egg cluster/clutch there. Signs might be moist residue, dried up residue or even the remains of a dried up clutch.

If you see something, that would mean you probably have Mystery (pomacea difusa) babies that hatched from a clutch you never noticed, and the mystery would be solved.
 
This is a link to the page at applesnail.net about Pomacea difusa, the snail species that is the most common out of the several species that are sold as "Mystery Snails".

Toward the bottom is a photo of the egg clutch.

When the eggs are newly laid they are a light color, and then usually darken if the baby snail inside is a darker color because that darker color begins to show through. Unfertilized eggs stay a lighter color.

Pomacea bridgesi
 
So we just got here and we found about 5 clear sacs with clear eggs in them. The babies do not look like the big one..can you send me a link to pictures of baby pond snails? I'm scared that's what they are it just doesn't make sense.
 
This is also a problem because we only have a 29 gallon aquarium. We have 2 grown guppies and about 20 baby guppies in there already. It seems like the snails are taking over!
 
Uh Oh!

Here's the page at applesnail.net that has various snails, basically all the common snails that are not in the apple snail family.

Pond snails are in the Physidae group, so look at the Physidae section of that page. Also look at the shell identification drawings and criteria at the top of the page. Baby Pond snails are lighter in color than the adults. the babies are usually a light to medium brown. To me, their shells are basically (american) football shaped.

Ramshorns are Planorbis and are also on this page, right below the Physidae/Pond snails.

The page is a good resource and is very long, with basic shell shape drawings with identification criteria at the top of the page, and photos and descriptions of the types of snails toward the bottom of the page, so be sure to scoll through it all.


Various freshwater snails
 
Yea I think we've decided our babies are pond snails. We have no idea how they got here.
Thank you for everything. You have been very helpful!
 
I'm glad I could help.

Search this forum for "pond snails" and "snails" for different views about pond snails and ways to get rid of them or at least control their population.

Some people squish them (use the back of a spoon to avoid cuts and infection to your fingers), so that their fish, often guppies, can enjoy eating the treat.

Others trap and remove them.

Others get an Assasin snail to eat them.
 
Okay thanks a lot!
we also figured out how we got them! We went to the pet store to buy a couple of guppies a while back and I noticed in the tank that there were a few baby snails in there. Well later on after we put our new fish in the tank I noticed we had a baby snail in ours. This was when all we had was the big mystery snail. So we figured it just came from him or her.
After that was when we started noticing more and more babies and egg clusters. We read that if they can't find a mate they breed themselves so it makes perfect sense now because she was the only other snail besides the mystery snail.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

M
Mystery Snails towering
Replies
1
Views
229
Andy Sager
Andy Sager
J
Snails
Replies
4
Views
274
jay777
J
S
Babies..
Replies
4
Views
376
ColdKoi
C
S
Snails eating molting shrimp.
Replies
2
Views
1K
ADsnail
ADsnail
S
Guppy Troubles - High pH?
Replies
3
Views
630
Aiken Drum
Aiken Drum

Latest posts

Back
Top Bottom