Ramshorn Snail Species And Traits

HI all,

I have a snail question that I haven't found an answer for yet. Back in January I added red and brown ramshorn snails to my 5g, not knowing at the time that I had 2 different kinds of snails. Since then, I noticed that the brown ones were eating some of my plants, so I began killing them. Fast forward to today and I think I may have just killed the last juvenile brown ramshorns a couple of days ago, but I think my plants are might still be getting eaten. The only other thing it could be is the red ramshorns, but I have heard that only brown ones will eat healthy plants. I believe that my red ramshorns are planorbella duryi, if that helps.

Some other info: this is happening in a Walstad tank that has had 0,0,0 nitrates for the last 2 months, at least. It is also low light, so I'm wondering if the low light combined with the low nutrients has lead to very little algae and biofilm for the snails to eat, causing even the red ramshorns to resort to eating plants. Can anyone confirm if this is typical behaviour for very hungry red ramshorns (planorbella duryi)? I will be feeding some wilted spinach once a week, and when I did this in the past the plant eating was much less, but that was also when there were still a lot of brown ramshorns in the tank.

I attached a somewhat recent picture of the tank for reference. The plants are still doing as well as they were in the photo.

 

Red rams and brown rams are the same species just a different color form. They won’t behave any differently from each other either.

All these snails are the same species, just different color forms. Pink, red, blue and brown.



Unless you were talking about the giant ramshorn, which is a different species but way larger and rather more expensive to acquire, so killing them would be strange. They do eat plants though.

Ramshorn snails rarely eat live plants unless they are already weak. All your plants look fine to me but I can’t see up close. Can you take photos of the damage?

 

Red rams and brown rams are the same species just a different color form. They won’t behave any differently from each other either.

All these snails are the same species, just different color forms. Pink, red, blue and brown.
View attachment 567359

Unless you were talking about the giant ramshorn, which is a different species but way larger and rather more expensive to acquire, so killing them would be strange. They do eat plants though.

Ramshorn snails rarely eat live plants unless they are already weak. All your plants look fine to me but I can’t see up close. Can you take photos of the damage?

Demeter thanks for clarifying. I had heard that the ramshorns in aquaria were all the same species but didn't know if I should believe it or not.

After thinking about it a bit more I feel like I probably have a combination of really hungry snails (I have GSA and green thread algae, neither of which they seem to be eating) and very little biofilm. Overall my system is pretty low energy, buy I think I'll start with some fertilizer considering that my plants are also showing signs of deficiency in phosphorus and manganese. Then the plants will hopefully get stronger and the problem will resolve itself after that. How does that all sound, considering that plants usually only get eaten by ramshorns if they're weak?

 

Sounds like a plant to me.

 

Thanks. I'll post the results after a while of adding fertilizer.

 

Just saying, I now realize my typo but cannot fix it. So I will play it off as a corny pun