Betafish305ca

I got some snails over the weekend for my fish tank, and they were labelled 'aglea eaters', or was it 'cleaning snails'... not exactly the best description of snails.

I've never seen any pics of these snails before..... They are tiny, bout the size of a finger nail, and they can grow to about twice their size. They don't have the usual round shell of regualr snails, they have more of long, narrow ones. The guy at the store said sometimes they float on the surface of the water to clean the surface water too sometimes.


Any help would be awesome!

eiginh

Do they look like this?

1. Malaysian Trumpet Snails
http://www.bettatude.com/Snails/mts.jpg

2. Mystery Snail (have diff. colors)
http://www.aquanourriplus.com/boutiq...pple_snail.jpg

3. Olive Nerite Snail
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2667/...4a8920090a.jpg

4. Rams-horn Snail
http://www.waysideaquatics.co.uk/ima...nail%20web.JPG

Betafish305ca

it looks like the 1st one mostly.... like the shell in the first pic is what its shell looks like, but the head from pic 3 is what my snails head looks like.... so its probably the 1st snail i guess

eiginh

It's not showing a head only an antennae, are you talking about the white spot?

aquarist48

Hello BetaFish. I have moved your thread one step more to the "Freshwater Invertebrates/Snails" section of the forum for more responses.

If you have the means to take photos...they would be a great help in helping others to ID them for you.
Best of luck!
Ken

Psychlist1972

If the shell is conical like the first, it's almost certainly a trumpet snail.

I love those snails. They're good for aerating my substrate (sand in one tank, planting substrate in another). They don't clean much algae, but they do a little. The only thing I've seen clean a ton of algae is a pleco, but those grow too big for most aqariums, and produce a *lot* of waste (garbage in, garbage out)

If you see those snails near the top of the tank, it's unlikely they're cleaning the water. Instead, they're telling you the water quality is bad and you need a water change immediately. Typically they'll stay on the ground, or if you have a sandy substrate, buried in there.

Pete